Squeak in college education
Jecel Assumpcao Jr
jecel at merlintec.com
Tue Feb 17 22:28:39 UTC 2004
On Tuesday 17 February 2004 15:58, Timothy Rowledge wrote:
> [...] A course for
> learning how to write good software ought to be Software Engineering
> and would be _hugely_ different to a good CS course. [...]
Very true. In Brazil we have several "technical" two to three year
course that are meant to turn out programmers, while the four year CS
or CE (computer engineering) courses were supposed to teach people to
invent or research new stuff. But since these longer courses are more
"glamourous" and more profitable, it is too tempting for schools to
stretch out their shorter courses and rename them. That dilutes the
meaning of "CS".
In 1997 I worked with a guy who taught the "introduction to programming"
course for first year CS students. He used C++, though he actually only
covered a subset of C. I thought it was totally crazy given that most
bugs would be way beyond the student's (and often the teacher's as
well) ability to understand and fix, so I suggested Java instead. After
all, if he was going to teach Pascal he might as well use a proper
dialect of that. He said that the students would never accept that as
they could see lots of ads for C++ jobs but none for Java. My reply:
"They are first years students!! They will be looking for a job in
2001, so what do they know? Force the issue and they will thank you for
it later."
I don't think he took my advice.
The point is that even as vocational training they are doing a very bad
job since they can't see the market trends.
-- Jecel
P.S.: I did the project I mentioned above in Smalltalk Express - you
didn't think I would touch Java myself, did you? ;-)
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