The Becker Blog

I just read Mark Guzdial’s excellent post on some of what’s wrong with how we teach introductory programming courses.

Question Everything: How We Teach Intro CS is Wrong

The notion that we should be modeling expert behaviour when teaching programming is silly. Experts work quite differently from novices. We accept this as a given in sport – if you make a novice do things an expert does you could very well cause them to injure themselves.

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Just heard on Mark Guzdial’s blog that “Georgia Tech’s College of Computing is now considering a proposal to remove Smalltalk from the required curriculum in favor of C++.”

This is another nail in the coffin of CS.

There is great value to learning many languages, not the least of which is that those who do come to understand the concept of ‘language’ and ‘programming’ better than anyone who only knows one language ever can. This makes them better programmers and better problem solvers.

There are those who feel CS is a dying discipline, and the more that CD departments contract in their view of what they should be doing, the more likely it is to come true.

Interesting and creative people are leaving CS departments, leaving behind …. can you guess? Theoreticians, mathematicians, and academic software engineers who haven’t written a real program, well, ever. These are the kind who say we shouldn’t be teaching about and with games, because “It gives the wrong impression.” (I actually heard these words from influential members of my former department). I can tell what impression it gives if you do things like games: THAT YOU ARE INTERESTING.

I once gave an assignment to a 3rd year CS class that involved building a client side search engine. The 1st step involved getting a complete list of file names and creating a format that would retain the names and directory structures in as small a space as possible.
They could use what ever language they wanted to. They had all learned C/C++ in 1st & second year.
Almost all chose to write a 2000+ line C++ program, over learning how to write the 20 lines of SED and Unix that would do the same thing, only better.

That’s what happens when they only learn one language.

CS at the university level is not about job training.

In Today’s MIT Tech Review: A Better, Cheaper Multitouch Interface

A new pressure-sensitive pad could improve large and small touch screens.

I’ve thought for some time that the SMART Technologies’ White Board which is marketed so vigorously to Alberta schools relies on physical technology that has become obsolete. Note the Wii mote stuff developed by Johnny Chung Lee. That technology’s been known for a few years now.

As if that’s not enough, Ken Perlin and his crew have come up with this. SMART Tech isn’t even mentioned in the article.

C’mon SMART, any chance you can try and live up to your name?

KEEP THEM CURRENT!!!!

Sheesh.

How can someone claim to be “with it” technologically when their webpages were last updated a YEAR ago? These are modern times. And your webpage is your public face. Do it right.

First, if you are in a technological discipline (computer science, ed tech, etc.) and you do NOT have a web page, that gives a bad impression. Shame on you. I know several people who do not maintain webpages, at least partly because they DON’T KNOW HOW. Someone looking for information on you can’t tell why you have no web presence, only that you don’t have one.

Second, understand that you will be judged by what you do and do not put on your webpages. You need not bare your soul, but also make sure you don’t look so clinical that you appear boring (unless of course, you really ARE boring in which case it is an honest reflection).

OK. So I did a little experiment (just now)…..

I took a look at a CS department of an online university. I won’t identify which one; the important thing here is that these values are representative – understand that the results are far from unique.

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Although it is not new, I came across this today.
Corrosive Leadership (Or Bullying by Another Name): A Corollary of the Corporatised Academy?
by Margaret Thornton

The literature reveals that the incidence of bullying is increasing in corporate workplaces everywhere. While the data is scant, it suggests that bullying in universities is also on the increase. Interviews with Australian academics support this finding. It is argued that the trend has to be understood in light of the pathology of corporatisation, which is designed to make academics do more with less. The focus on productivity parallels the harassment to which workers in the private sector may be subjected in the hope that they will work harder and maximise profits. Avenues of redress are considered which show that dignitary harms remain inchoate as legal harms. While common law and anti-discrimination legislation regimes may occasionally offer a remedy to targeted individuals, it is averred that these avenues are incapable of addressing the causative political factors that induce corrosive leadership.

There were a few things that particularly resonated with me – sadly, I have first hand experience. It took them five years, but I finally had to leave a job I LOVED to save myself. From what I hear, if anything, the place I left is getting worse. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the mini-feed from FaceBook, I saw this Blog from Mark Guzdial. It is a MUST READ for anyone concerned about the enrollment malaise the computer science departments continue to face.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKUURHQRKBJYSU

Here’s an excerpt: “Colin Potts, a professor here at Georgia Tech who works in software engineering, has said that the goal of software engineering is to remove all the fun out of programming. When I mention that quote to other software engineering researchers, they often agree with it. The goal of software engineering is for the creativity to appear in the design, and the actual programming should be akin to construction—a simple activity of putting together the pieces.

It seems to me that the cause of the student’s disdain for “programming” and for the decline in CS enrollment lies there. As civil engineers need armies of construction workers to build their designs, and as mechanical engineers use armies of factory workers to produce their designs, so do software engineers use armies of programmers or coders, people who are explicitly not software engineers, to produce their designs. Few students go to college to become construction or factory workers. Why should it be surprising, then, that few Western students want to go to college to be the Information Age equivalent workers?

Education historians and theorists have argued that the current US educational system was designed to produce factory workers. They say that we need to revise our system to produce knowledge workers for the future. I propose that our current undergraduate computer science programs are designed to produce coders for software engineers. We spend our time, especially in the early classes, focusing on coding standards and writing good, clean code. Rarely, and certainly not until the upper division courses, do we emphasize creativity and novel problem-solving techniques. That meshes with good engineering practice. That does not necessarily mesh with good science practice.”

Brilliant.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen anything really new when it comes to presenting text, but this one looks like it has a lot of potential. Here is a link to the original article (the samples below come from there):

http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=/articles/r_walker/

The technique described in this paper turns this:

into:

For online reading this looks like a terrific idea.

I have recently been working on a new methodology for the analysis of commercial video games in order to uncover mechanisms used to support learning. I am calling this new approach Instructional Ethology. It combines
structural analysis based on black box reverse engineering (adapted from ontological excavation) with behavioural analysis based on an adaptation of the basic approach to studying animal behaviour. (For more as it develops see: http://www.minkhollow.ca/KB/PhD/Thesis07/doku.php?id=thesis:06.methodology)

It occurs to me that this methodology could also have much broader applications in software generally – as a way to analyse usability. It obviously needs development and lots of testing, but as far as I know *no-one* has thought off applying ethological techniques to program behaviour. As for “Why ANIMAL behaviour and not human behaviour studies?” Animals can’t talk to us so all we have is observations of behaviour. This is the same position that most users of software are in – they have no clue what is happening underneath (nor should they have to, mostly) so code analysis is unlikely to provide insights to making software more usable/intuitive/comprehensible to users. So perhaps, software ethology has some potential.

There is a wonderful article about Usable GUI design at http://benroe.com/files/gui.html; one of the best things to remember is:

The most basic point in all computer UI design is that the user does not want to use your application. They want to get their work done as quickly and easily as possible, and the application is simply a tool aiding that. The more you can keep your application out of the way of the user, the better. Effort spent on using your application is effort not spent on the work the user is trying to do.

This connects very nicely with studying UI design by studying the behaviour of the program.

Stay tuned.