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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