On Wednesday 08 August 2001 12:33, Mark Guzdial wrote:
> As I said in my note in reply to Alan, there are at least two
> possibilities to explain the large failure rate in CS:
> - We're doing a really lousy job teaching and need to fix it

Certainly! Adapting Papert's great example, why are there countries 
where 100% of the population learns to speak English while in Brazil I 
meet so few who did? Many of those who never learned tried for 8 years 
or more at school, with some paying serious money after that for one of 
the countless "professional English courses" out there.

If you guessed that this needs skills the human brain loses after the 
first three years, try again. Most of the adults in the situation I 
described above advance tremendously after spending some three months 
in an English speaking country.

It is simply that we are doing a really lousy job of teaching English 
down here.

> - Many people can't learn to program, but then the question is why?

That depends on what you mean by "learn". Most people who sit down at a 
piano can learn to play it well enough to enjoy it and have others 
enjoy it (or at least be polite about it ;-). But not all get good 
enough that I would pay to listen to them play.

I am sure that nearly everyone can learn to program, but most should 
think about other careers. So the question is: is it worth learning at 
all for them, then? My answer is yes: not only will they gain skills 
that can be applied elsewhere (even though I have read studies claiming 
otherwise) but as amature programmers they will be able to build useful 
things for themselves and their friends.

But learning to program is very different from learning a programming 
language. Back in the early 1980s, there was a "professional computer 
course" in nearly every corner teaching BASIC (they have gone and come 
back teaching how to open Word) and when people asked me for my advice 
I told them not to waste their money. I never saw anybody learn 
programming there. On the other hand, I met some people who spent some 
$80 on a Sinclair clone plus a little more on magazines and would then 
patiently type in these long listings of ugly code. After a while they 
would start to make changes or even try to port things written for the 
TRS 80 or Apple II. Eventually, they put aside the magazines and 
started playing on their own and creating original programs.

I know there are many learning styles and that these explorers are a 
small fraction of the population, but the point is that in most bad 
computer courses you don't get to *read* much code. Before open source 
had become popular once more you could blame it on a lack of code to 
read. But now most of what is available is simply too much for anybody, 
much less for someone starting out. I have never read the Linux 
sources, but mostly "grep" to directly find just what I need. Squeak is 
better in that the browser organizes everything and presents small 
chunks, but I would say that anything that is too large to be retyped 
is too large for a beginner to read.

-- Jecel