rcj@burl.UUCP (08/18/83)
This article really concerns people who have softwaphobia. This is not the fear of non-performance in bed; it is a very real problem that some people have -- they block out all of their intelligence when they first try to learn programming because they are so scared. The solution, you ask? TALK TO THEM IN ENGLISH!!!!!!!! I have found one example in teaching programming that works wonders, although I am the first to admit that I am an analogy FANATIC: Suppose you want to explain the concept of looping through an array, something that a lot of people with softwaphobia have problems understanding (believe it or not, you hackers): Simply use the analogy of trying to find the blue car in the parking lot. You ask one of these people that question and they will tell you that they just look out at the lot and point. True, but make them break it down and realize that they really looked at the first car they saw (no matter that it took a fraction of a second), and asked themselves "Is this car blue?". When the answer was negative, they moved to the second car and repeated. Using small integers to represent the different colors and showing them looping through an array of numbers representing the cars in the lot is now not such a big deal. We need to start educating people in English again, not in meta-tokens, non-terminals, and all that other crap. You can get to that stuff eventually, but give them something that they can get quickly so you keep their attention, really relate to so that you keep their interest, and quickly make the smallest possible leap to the computer's represen- tion/method/madness so you FOSTER UNDERSTANDING; not just wrote memorization and blind categorization of problems. Let's put the real world back into software and teach these new kids coming through that they can use the computer as an extension of their own thinking processes -- they have the best algorithms ever developed almost from birth, and the computer has the speed to multiply the efficiency and creativity that they bring to it. Boy, is it late, er, early, *Sigh* -- The MAD Programmer -- 919-228-3814 (Cornet 291) alias: Curtis Jackson ...![ floyd sb1 mhuxv ]!burl!rcj