15 Aug
2005
15 Aug
'05
11:10 p.m.
On 16/08/2005, at 2:29 PM, Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner wrote:
Back in college, I took electronics for non-EE majors. The first
half of
the course dealt with analog electronics (including the analog
characteristics of transistors) and while most of the other
students had an
easy time with that portion, I struggled hard and I *still* don't
quite
understand the operating characteristics of a transistor, or what
exactly
the difference is between a PNP and NPN transistor.
Second half the course though, was digital electronics which I found
trivial, although most of the other students had real difficulty
with the
concept of +5V being a logical 1 (what? 5 = 1? What? What the
hell are
you talking about?) and the less said about Boolean algebra, the
better 8-P
Thank goodness there's someone else who had exactly the same problems
I did. I just thought I was stupid or something :-)
And if programmer can't grasp the difference
between equality and
assignment, then heaven help us when you get to pointers ...
The issue I had was teaching FORTRAN to first year Maths students. No
amount of contrived explanations helped - the standard one being
comparing variables to street numbers and how the house at number 74
could contain many different things. Even after 25 years or so it
still seems a poor analogy. Getting over this conceptual difficulty
is one of the reasons for teaching assembly language programming in
CS courses but that's an argument that's basically lost now - teach
them java, VB whatever's the current fad language (oooh, asbestos
suit time now - also drifting off topic).
Huw Davies | e-mail: Huw.Davies at kerberos.davies.net.au
Melbourne | "If soccer was meant to be played in the
Australia | air, the sky would be painted green"