5 Jan
2012
5 Jan
'12
6:52 p.m.
On Thu, 5 Jan 2012, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I also think that there is a significant difference
between teaching
elementary/middle-school children (6-12) and college students (18-23)
specifically in reference to abstractness. Young adults pursuing a
technical education are going to be able to handle abstract concepts
better than someone half their age or younger (or they are going to be
finding a new field of study ;-).
Clancy/Harvey (UCB): "The very first course in our lower division
undergraduate [first year of collefge] curricula is Abstraction, using
SCHEME. It is a fantastic language, capable of many things THAT NO OTHER
LANGUAGE CAN DO."
[They then put a problem on the board that "cannot be done in any other
language, becayse recursion is the only possible way to do it."
(traversing a 2 dimensional array)
While they typed in their solution, I wrote out solutions (WITHOUT
recursion) on my notepad in C, BASIC, FORTRAN, and was halfway through
COBOL! (I didn't get a chance to do APL, ASM, or Pascal)
Their religious proselytizing got seriously in the way of their arguments
of how good it is.]
Q: I see that your SECOND course is "demystification" using C. Since
that's a different language in non-trivial ways from the previous course,
will the students be learning C in the second course, instead of the
first one?
A: NO! We expect them to already have a solid working knowledge of C
before they come here.
WHAT???
They repeated it. Any student entering their first year of college there
as a CS major was assumed to already know C.
Q: Won't some students have difficulty with that?
A: Oh, it's "Social Darwinism". We have too many entering students, so we
WANT 80% to drop out of the program in the first year. If we don't get at
least 80% leaving the program, then we merely increase the workload until
enough fail and leave. Sometimes we have to work them 20 hours a day, and
assign 4:00 AM lab times, etc. to get the desired result. They won't be
expelled, or anything, they can still become business majors.
[I lost some respect for the UCB CS program]
[Does their "Darwinism" select for CS ability, or STAMINA and tolerance
for ABUSE?]
[Sorry, Toby, but C/H prejudiced me against SCHEME. I do still intend
some day to give it a fair try]
Q: What's your timeframe for implementing this curricula?
A: Oh, we've been doing it with wonderful success for over 5 years.
Q: The current college catalog is nothing like that, it still has the
traditional program. When do you expect the catalog changes to be made.
A: Oh, that happened YEARS ago. This years catalog just has a glitch and
must have reprinted an old version.
[Doe Library [reference desk] has current and older catalogs. NO prior
catalog had their sequence!]
I don't think that UC Berkeley has THE ANSWER.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com