Having followed this discussion closely i feel i also need to put in my view especially having been a student a few years ago. first every generation will always have something to destruct them from Reading fortunately or unfortunately currently its face book. I remember at our time my friends who were offering other causes not Computer science like me made me look a failure in life after i failed to give them 'Click here' steps on how to access chart rooms. Chat rooms were the leading motivating factor for students to become computer Literate.
Secondly i remember Paul used to always remind us that Programming is not Magic but Logic and all you need it to break the problem down to small parts etc etc although almost every one was quietly disagreeing. The biggest problem there is fear and some one made it clear with that typical statement of "how do you expect someone from Kihihi.........". Make a competition for EA you will be over whelmed by applicants but tell them that even the son of Bill G can apply for the competition and many MUK students will ignore it and open their face book pages. Another thing Programmer don't want to acknowledge is that Programming in very Hard especially for starters hence takes extreme stubbornness at least in our uganda for a student to choose it among the other available alternative fields in IT. I back my submission with a life example of a girl i found in MUK labs wondering how her code of seven lines was giving double errors i.e 14 errors. She confessed she had been trying to debug the program for 4 hour but all in vain. On looking at her code i showed her a semi colony that was missing and the program compiled well instead of her being happy i saw tears in her eyes as she made one statement that "no wander all our programming lecturers are sadists they always just want to get us retakes if this is what the do for a leaving then they must already be insane! " Tell me what you can do to such a girl to join Google code summer. You blame Lecturers for northing they have done their parts but some decisions are taken by individuals and becoming a ruthless programmer is one of them. Just my thoughts Regards Arinda JB On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 7:25 PM, Mike Barnard <[email protected]>wrote: > > > On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 4:36 PM, Mugarura Cavin <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Lug, >> >> i like the very good ideas, that have come in, >> problem is, am not sure, if we are treating symptoms or the core of the >> problem. >> >> its very easy to blame students, lecturers, and the weather. We can also >> throw around very cool ideas, and my question is, what will be the real >> effect. Since we have baseline data for the past few years (as zero), can we >> predict that next year we shall have 15 students, since these ideas that are >> very good, have been circulated. >> >> Uganda, was more developed than Singapore, and many of the Asian Tigers. >> The problem is not students, who dont read, or lecturers who use "Databases >> for Dummies". The problem is else where, short of solving the problem, we >> can whine all day, and the real effect will be zero. >> >> > Cavin, you say, 'the problem is else where' meaning that it is not students > who are not interested or lectures who cannot create an enabling > environment... so, where or what is this problem that you have seen? > > > -- > Mike > > Of course, you might discount this possibility, but remember that one in > a million chances happen 99% of the time. > ------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > LUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://kym.net/mailman/listinfo/lug > > LUG is generously hosted by INFOCOM http://www.infocom.co.ug/ > > All Archives can be found at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ > > The above comments and data are owned by whoever posted them (including > attachments if any). The List's Host is not responsible for them in any way. > --------------------------------------- > > >
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