[GAP] CrossTalk CS Education article

[Robert Dewar]

Francisco J. Montoya wrote:
>
> 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.

and from a pragmatic point of view, if all the students can do is play,
that for SURE is something that programmers in India, China, or lots of
other places can do just as well as they can much cheaper!

> 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).

And again, they have plumbers and hardware stores in India and China
that have much cheaper prices!

Maybe we should retitle CS 101 "Outsourceable Skills 101" if all we
do is to teach fun playing with Java libraries :-)