On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 12:27 PM, Stacie Farmer <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've been reading through all of the great comments about school credibility > and I had a few questions of my own. We just started a local chapter of Girl > Develop It here in Utah. Our main goal is to create a community for women who > may be a little unsure about tech or just need support and encouragement to > enter and/or grow within the field. We also provide classes for those who may > not have the time/money/etc to attend a traditional college, but need skills > so they can enter the workforce. > > I was wondering what your opinions were on the type of programs, ours and > those similar, that provide non-traditional tech training? Specifically, I'm > looking for where you think these programs fail or succeed and what > specifically we should be teaching our members who want to become developers. > > There's a lot of criticism about code.org and I have to say I agree with a > lot of it. Coding is more than just learning a language. There are a lot of > underlying principles and I feel like abstract thinking and problem solving > are some of the key skills that are being glossed over in favor of "let's > simplify the process as much as we can to get more people pursuing this". > What are your thoughts and what kinds of things can we do to improve these > forms of non-traditional education?
I was an information systems major (not CS) and I had two classes on database design in school. The course work wasn't specific to a flavor of sql database server, it was a lot of pencil and paper diagramming for concepts and then more hands on. In the other thread about schools, there were quite a few references to job applicants that couldn't do SQL statements. It sounds like those were common interview questions for some businesses. I think the database classes were two classes that had a huge impact on my job as I used that learning in almost everything I was involved in. Even MS Access uses sql statements. :) I think teaching proper database design and sql statements is something that works well in a class environment and is a bit harder for people to learn on their own (maybe I'm wrong). The thing I wish I had more exposure to and learned in more depth was object oriented programming (inheritance, etc). I remember in a java class finally having that 'aha' moment when it started to make sense (again, I was not a CS major). I think some scripting languages are implementing more OO concepts. It is one of those fundamental concepts that runs through languages. _______________________________________________ UPHPU mailing list [email protected] http://uphpu.org/mailman/listinfo/uphpu IRC: #uphpu on irc.freenode.net
