Comments for Compy Ed: Blogging about Computer Science Education

Comment on Tim Meyer Rants by compyed

compyed — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 14:52:16 +0000

This is the problem when a comment comes so long after the original article. Hard to recall what was written.

But a simple answer to your question is why people aren’t more engaged when they are at a movie theater. In this case, I’ll have to redefine “engaged” to mean interested, rather than interactively involved. The answer, in that situation, would be that not every movie thrills every viewer, and viewers have some expectations about the film’s ability to engage them. If it fails to live up to expectations, they tune out, get bored, or actively dislike it.

To put it in a classroom situation, first, many students are likely to be introverts, not extroverts, though choice of majors matters. Second, asking good questions, having good opinions is something that has to be learned. Many folks in academia find their inquisitive nature inherent in who they are, and they can’t understand why students, of all people, fail to share this same curiosity.

Finally, there’s peer pressure that may result from high school or earlier on, where kids who were “smart” and answered all the questions were shunned, so most kids who might have something interesting to say don’t actually say it.

It may exasperate us that students fail to respond in such situations, but we are left with the students we have, which means we all have to deal.

Comment on Tim Meyer Rants by Tim Meyer

Tim Meyer — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:57:27 +0000

Tim,

I’ll look past your derogatory remarks. In fact, I agree with most everything you’ve said. “Who is Tim Meyer?” Just some schlepp teaching Econ, that’s who.

When I wrote that article, I was frustrated with how many different approaches failed to motivate students. Since then, numerous people have commented, blogged, and mainly criticised the article.

It is amazing how many different meanings are interpreted be each reader. People have inserted meaning to suit their own purposes. I’ll try to be more transparent next time.

Maybe my class is boring, but I still can’t figure out why students aren’t more engaged if they’re actually in class.

Regards,
Tim

Comment on Do We Need a New Pascal? by compyed

compyed — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:52:31 +0000

There’s an interesting discussion about this Greg. In particular, some people talk about languages versus tools. Although Java is verbose, IDEs such as Eclipse make the verbosity manageable, at least, from a development standpoint. I just read an article this morning talking about languages like Erlang and Haskell (Haskell being functional) where code was written in 1/10 the lines of comparable languages. Having said that, I’d like to see the example they used, because one can create skewed examples.

I’d love to see functional languages get more play. And the two are not necessarily exclusive. OCaml has become quite popular (relatively speaking) and it is functional and OO.

Comment on Do We Need a New Pascal? by greg

greg — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 22:14:18 +0000

It is sad to see educators advocating OOP when it is evident that functional programming is the future. Java is a nasty inherently verbose programming language that force you to go round loops to do things that could be done simply in functional languages.

Comment on A Matter of Taste by compyed

compyed — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:22:12 +0000

I don’t mean it like Knuth, at least, I don’t think so. I haven’t read his work on literate programming, but I always thought it had to do with adding documentation within code. What I mean is more like a group of people discussing code, adding comments, etc.

Comment on A Matter of Taste by Chris

Chris — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 14:27:33 +0000

The idea that programs could be written – or at least presented — like stories reminds me of some of Knuth’s ideas for literate programming. To say it has never caught on is understating it, but still it seems like a useful concept.

Comment on Master Coders (an opinion piece) by tabard

tabard — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 18:00:49 +0000

I’ve read almost all of your blog posts and I think it’s full of interesting new ideas that teachers should considerer in their everyday class. I have taken some notes myself, of course.

When I was doing my graduation in Computer Science I purposed the same idea you presented here, of comparing versions between novice coders and experienced ones. I think it was instructive and extremely fun. In general I think students are always opened to new methods and techniques of learning because they are sick of the old presentation model. Teachers should seek real Socratic Methods (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_Method).

I hope you can continue writing about Computer Science Education and Teaching in general as well as you have been so far.

Thank you,
Nuno Morgadinho
MSc Student from Portugal
(nuno.morgadinho at gmail dot com)