Teaching and Learning
From SanguineV
Contents |
About this page
This page is here to discuss aspects of teaching and learning (mostly) related to computer science, mathematics and information technology. These are articles, references and diatribes that I find interesting or insightful.
Programming
How to find good programmers?
The following two articles provide some insight into the difficulties of identifying good programmers and also what it takes to program well. While I will not claim to agree completely with the authors' views, I do agree that the trend towards a single language (Java is typical, though the same could be argued for almost any other) for teaching is a mistake. Certainly I wonder about programmers who cannot complehend inheritence, polymorpishm (of any type - see here for discussion of the varieties), recursion, pointers, not to mention many other essential concepts.
Anyway, here are the articles:
Computer Science
Dijkstra
Edsger W. Dijkstra has written a number of insighful comments on computer science that I highly recommend reading. Apart from a significant number of contributions to computer science knowledge, he has also produced the following works I recommend for their perspective:
How do we tell truths that might hurt?
On the cruelty of really teaching computing science and in handwritten PDF
Computer scientists and camels
Anyone who has studied computer science (or if they are even more unfortunate - taught it) will know that there seems to be two groups who attempt to learn computer science:
- Those who seem to understand it and do well
- Those who just don't seem to "get it" and struggle.
As someone who has studied, worked with people learning, and taught computer science I have struggled with the second group of people quite often. How do you teach them and what is it that they don't get? Well, some recent research suggests that there may be a way to at least identify those who are most likely to struggle. Although the authors are careful to point out that this does not mean that they WILL struggle... Their work can be found framed in the context of camels (no relation to Caml to my knowledge); The camel has two humps.
Insightful diatribes
Frameworks and hammers
Recently I have heard a great deal about how the solution to so many problems can be expressed as a "framework". This framework may be to organise information, design an application, describe a concept, or just about anything. In fact I know of several students at UTS who are busy creating frameworks for everything from mobile government to trust networks to intelligent agents. That said, I have become skeptical and cynical of frameworks, too often they seem to be a way to coerce thoughts or ideas into a rigid shape that must conform to some underlaying "framework" that then prevents them from really solving the problem elegently and efficiently. Where am I going with all this, I want to direct your attention to Why I Hate Frameworks... you may never see them the same away again.
