Some thoughts on freshmen programming classes
 sp <foo bar com> |
Tuesday, December 12 2006 14:35.06 CST |
My college career is slowly coming to an end. If everything is going according to the plan I am going to graduate with a Master of Science degree in Computer Science at the end of the next semester. During my time at college I worked as a TA for five classes and I will probably work as a TA for a sixth class next semester. Four of the five classes were Intro to C++ classes taught to 4th semester students. The other class was an Intro to Programming class taught to freshmen.
During the last few years I was in the role of the student and I was in the role of the teacher in programming classes. In that time I developed opinions about the curriculum and pretty much everything that went on in class. I already promised some of my teachers that I am going to write down everything once I hold my degree in my hands. Every complaint and every suggestion will be neatly categorized in a visually appealing LaTeX document. Thats the plan at least.
One of the suggestions Im planning to write down is the way introductory programming classes are taught and especially the programming language used in class. The style of introductory programming classes and the programming languages taught in college are certainly popular topics to complain about on the Internet. Joel Spolsky decries JavaSchools where graduates know neither pointers nor recursion. Dan Zambonini touches on the topic as part of his idea of a decent CS curriculum (the article started a Slashdot discussion with 654 comments too). On Digg someone raised a comparable question and received 154 answers. And once in a while you can hear surprising news like MIT getting rid of Scheme and replacing it with Python in undergraduate classes.
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| Posted: Wednesday, December 31 1969 18:00.00 CST | |