On Thu, 4 Nov 2004, Steve Meyers wrote:
I've never heard CS 142 described as requiring "a lot of work". I never even went to the lectures, and I generally whipped out the labs in under 15 minutes each. My pre-university programming experience consisted of some moderately advanced QuickBasic.
a) Imagine a person in that class who has never done *any* programming before in their life, but wants to learn. "Moderately advanced QuickBasic" means you've already got your head around a lot of the CS concepts that "normal" people have never heard about before in their life.
b) CS 142 has changed a lot since the Pascal days. I took it (I think) the first or second year they started using Java, and it's even changed a lot since *then* (with the workload going up, not down).
c) From my experience and what I've heard, maybe the fact that you never went to lectures *helped*. From what I can tell, those who succeed in
CS 142 are those who are able to learn how to do it on their own, with Google and javac (and *maybe* the textbook). Those who go to lectures to learn how to program are disappointed and frustrated, and solely dependent on the TAs to learn how to program. As you know, sometimes you get good TAs and sometimes you get lousy TAs.
Maybe some of you feel that that's how it *should* be--if you can't learn the material on your own, you don't belong in the CS department--and I won't argue with you even if I don't necessarily agree with you--but there are plenty of people in other departments like Soren described who want to learn a little bit of programming skills. When people ask me, "I just want to learn how to program ... what class should I take?" I answer, "Don't take a class from BYU," because in my opinion there aren't any classes being offered for that sort of person.
Soren, is there any way others can help you in this endeavor? It's something I've always ranted long about and would love to add a paragraph or two to a petition-like document to catch the ear of the higher-ups in the CS department. I'm sure there are many others on the list with similar stories who want to see a programming class taught for non-CS majors.
~ Ross
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This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
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