On 01/07/07, Lindsay Marshall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Bjorn Reese wrote: >> The students used longer titles, such as "count number of >> occurrences" and "find if any element is of some sort", whereas the >> professionals used short titles, such as "count" and "find". >> >> This could indicate that the looping constructs belong to the >> basic-level category (Rosch, 1978) of the professionals but not >> of the student. >Or it could mean that the students were in the habit of being >overly verbose in answering questions, since terseness is generally >not rewarded in exams, while it often is rewarded in business. Indeed it could also mean the students had absorbed a lesson about writing meaningful comments and the professionals were, well, professional programmers.
Yes, indeed it could. It's an interesting point because, in my experience teaching 'professional skills' such as good documentation standards is one of the single most damaging things that a teacher can do to new programmers. We regularly get students who have learned 'programming' at College, and somehow have absorbed a set of nonsensical rules like "comment every line of code" and yet don't understand basics like assignment. Apart from thinking unrepeatable thoughts about their previous teachers, it strikes me that this sort of thing is massively confusing, as the biggest difficulty in teaching programming is breadking up the huge number of concepts students have to learn and teaching them one at a time. This is, I think, where Betty Edwards really was quite brilliant -- not only is her book somewhat subversive, but it breaks down a very complex cognitive process into a few very simple actions. Sarah -- Sarah Mount, Senior Lecturer, Creative Computing, Coventry University http://cogentcomputing.org/ http://www.youtube.com/groups_videos?name=creativecomputing http://varspool.blogspot.com/ http://flickr.com/photos/sarahmount/ ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List (discuss@ppig.org) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
