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.
