I recall attending an interesting seminar called "The importance of process"
by someone (Geoff Lund perhaps?) from the University of Abertay Dundee.
They had monitored each student's work in terms of
- time taken between compiler runs;
- number of errors each compile;
- number of lines of source code each compile;
- progress towards final product.
You ought to check with them about the details. But if my memory serves me,
I think the worst novices wrote huge chunks of code before the first
compile, didn't always eliminate errors before writing more code (!), and
gave up. Better students wrote programs incrementally, compiled it regularly
and eliminated errors. The experts also wrote large chunks of code at a
time, but had few errors.
(The seminar was at the 5th Annual Conference on the Teaching of Computing,
Dublin, August 97.)
Dave W Farthing
School of Computing
University of Glamorgan, UK
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit
the target."
