Re: Is Unicode character a vowel?

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I agree entirely. A programming language is merely a tool. No mechanic was intimidated
when foreign cars required metric tool sets, because they knew how to use the tool.
Programming is the same. Most of us can pick up a new language, insofar as the syntax, in
about a week (learning the massive class libraries for Java, C#, or MFC is another story
entirely...) because we understand the key ideas: statements, conditionals, loops,
assignment, functions, parameters, scope of variables, etc. The rest is just meaningless
syntactic rules.

I tend to object to educators who say "We can't use computers because we don't want to
teach today's technology---by the time our students graduate, [Word, Pascal, C, Java] will
be obsolete and they'll have to learn something new!" I point out that if they did their
jobs right, the students will have all the key principles. "Well, here's the analogy.
Let's not teach the multiplication tables, because (a) everyone has calculators and (b)
the tables only go up to 9x9 and they'll have bigger numbers to multiply". The same
teachers who tell me that learning Word is worthless because the students might end up
using WordPerfect will passionately defend teaching multiplication tables because this
allows general principles to be taught...they don't see that Word just a tool, and once a
student knows how a text editor works, nearly all text editors work the same way (we will
ignore vi as a text editor, because it's crap anyway)
joe

On Wed, 9 May 2007 05:55:49 +1000, "Ian Semmel" <anyone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Computer education in schools seems to be measured by the number of
computers in the school. The more computers, the better the education.

If it was up to me, there would be no computers in primary schools
(elementary schools in the US ?). Students should learn all the precepts of
being able to program without a computer, eg logic, analysis etc (as well as
learning how to write which would be a bonus).

As it is, all they are learning is current technology and do not have an
open mind to adapt to what is going to come 20 years down the track. Being a
whizz at Word or being able to hack code using JavaScript or PHP does not in
my opinion constitute education. Once the fundamentals of programming are
grasped, being able to adapt to the syntax of a particular language or
operating environment is no big deal.


"Joseph M. Newcomer" <newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ijqv33pi96kjm40j8hnoi78kvnm1fj4bc7@xxxxxxxxxx
Some years ago I became convinced that we are teaching programming all
wrong. So I
acquired some books on infant learning and language learning, and
discovered that I was
indeed right.

Imagine the following: we lock a child in a room for 18 years, feed him or
her through a
slot, and the person has no human contact. Then we take them out and try
to teach them
English by saying "A noun is a name word, and names a person, place or
thing. A verb
describes an action or state of being. An adjective modifies a noun..."
and see how far
you get. But we have no qualms about teaching programming to people who
have no
background by telling them about variables, control structures, functions,
etc. They have
no basis of expectation. So we get people who end up being really bad
programmers. A few
of this overcome this and become good programmers.

So I started teaching by teaching algorithms and data structures without
code. I taught
an 11-year-old how to program in this fashion; by 12 he was "programming"
in C by writing
the comments about what he wanted to do, and I played compiler and
compiled his comments
into C code. By 13 he was using pointers comfortably. He graduated a
couple years ago
with a degree in computer graphics.


.....


Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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