Beni Cherniavsky said: <snip>
>> By far the biggest difficulty I've seen students have is deciding how >> and when to make their own functions. This is exacerbated by the fact >> that in beginning programming you typically only write small programs >> where writing your own functions might not be useful. >> > Writing only small programs is harmful. Students must get the chance to > write > medium programs and to refactor them a lot. I think that any attempt at > teaching good style and structure by "here is how you should write" is > futile. > Only by experiencing the hard way how is it to program without good > structure will one learn its importance. > I agree with this basic assessment. However it is also true that students won't necessarily just "stumble" on good ways of (re)organizing programs. They probably need to see/write a couple programs in the "here is how you should write" mold before the hard lessons of experience will be really sucessful in internalizing this knowledge. --John -- John M. Zelle, Ph.D. Professor of Computer Science Wartburg College _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
