rcd@opus.UUCP (Dick Dunn) (12/19/84)
A side issue from the "Teaching Programming in High School" discussion-- Brian Pinkerton writes: > > Also important, I think, is the ability to break down an idea into its > components. This is why I DON'T advocate teaching programming > languages to 1st semester CS students. What good does teaching some > pascal do if they can't make use of its structured nature? The good that it does is to give them something tangible. It is almost always a mistake to embark on teaching a new discipline with a large amount of theory but little connection to pragmatics. It's possible to do it with good upper-division students who've had a lot of practice in abstract reasoning, but I've seen it fail miserably in lower-division courses. (A standard example is that a lot of engineers don't get much real grasp of calculus until they start using it in their physics courses.) Another advantage is that a programming language (if it's a decent one) provides a nearly ideal notation for discourse. Discussing programming concepts with Pascal is far easier than discussing them with English, in much the same way that discussing the concepts of calculus is easier with the notations of algebra supplemented by limits, derivatives, and integrals. (There's an excellent statement by Iverson in "A Programming Language" to the effect that the effort involved in mastering a suitable notation is well worthwhile.) -- Dick Dunn {hao,ucbvax,allegra}!nbires!rcd (303)444-5710 x3086 ...Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile.