[GAP] CrossTalk CS Education article

[Francisco J. Montoya]

Some important issues have been addressed in this discussion. I find
three major topics that are making a lot of damage to CS in general, and
CS1 and programming in particular:

1) Learning should be a funny activity.
2) Most curricula are more and more dropping or substantially reducing
important topics, like maths, fundamentals of programming languages and
compiler design, etc.
3) Students should study only (or mainly) the last fashion or most
popular language (which nowadays is Java).

1) Unamuno said: "the teacher that teaches playing, eventually plays to
teach; and the student that learns playing, eventually plays to learn".
And this is utterly true, I'm afraid. Motivation of students is a great
thing, but I believe this shouldn't ever be done at the cost of giving
up with important contents and teaching only attractive (and most times
useless) stuff.

2) Almost daily I have to bear listening some of my colleagues claiming
that there makes no sense to teach/learn lots of things that are already
done (?) in nowadays programming languages libraries and environments
(this' something to do with plumbers and hardware stores). I wonder what
are we going to do the day in which the last guy who knows how to write
a compiler dies... With maths the case is even worse. When I try to
teach how to verify the correctness of iterative/recursive algorithms
(using "heavy math artillery" like the principle of induction) I have to
hear my students claiming that I'm teaching maths instead of
programming.

3) This should not be relevant if it wouldn't get the support of an
important part of many faculties. In Spain, the competence among
universities and graduate programs for attracting students makes
faculties to involve into an auction downward in the curricula quality
to grasp students. Among the many actions related to this auction, they
try to offer just what students like most. Teaching programming using
the last fashion language, which also offers nice GUI and eye-attracting
stuff, and lots of libraries to solve in just a few lines what you
should program by your own in other languages, is a very powerful weapon
to fight in this war. If you add also that Java is massively required in
most small business (which seem to be the only kind of jobs our students
aspire to) the struggle in this auction is served.

I'm rather pessimistic about all this, but anyhow I do my best to put my
little "grain of sand" in this huge beach, and I will as long as I can.

Regards,


-- 
Francisco J. Montoya
Depto. Informatica y Sistemas, Facultad de Informatica
(E-30071 Campus de Espinardo) Universidad de Murcia (Spain)
Voice:+34 968364620, Fax:+34 968364151, e-mail: fmontoya at dif.um.es