On Sat, Nov 15, 2003 at 08:44:41AM +1100, Rommel P Feria wrote: > When I was teaching Java programming as an elective and C as a > language for programming 1, I mostly gave simple mathematical problems > and lo and behold, the students today find it quite difficult to solve > these problems.
I suppose you do mean that in a relative sense, Prof. :) While I was never one of your students at the undergrad level, I do remember helping some of my friends who were your students slog through the machine problems you assigned them. I clearly remember one problem you gave back around 1995 where they were supposed to write a program that found the shortest path between two points of an arbitrary user-generated maze. This was for CS11, the first elementary programming course. The only solution I could think of was generating a graph from the maze, with vertices for every crossroads in the maze (plus the start and end points of the maze), and then using Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest path between the start and end points of the maze! We only learned this algorithm formally a year later, with CS32, the data structures course. I only managed to find a solution because I had been reading Sedgewick's Algorithms since I was in high school. :) Surely you didn't expect the majority of students right out of high school to be familiar with graph algrithms and other topics of discrete mathematics? ;) Regardless, I think that your observation in general is still dead on correct. > Shesh! Again, I do not blame the university entirely but mostly the > primary and secondary institutions providing poor mathematical > aptitude! NAKAKAINIS. I mean, these students think of just passing > Calculus or Discrete Math and after that, they NEVER apply it in their > programming assignments or tasks. Shesh! > This goes much deeper than primary and secondary institutions, I think. It's an entire cultural issue. Something about the way we as a nation are inculcated creates a deep aversion to math in all its forms. > Programming is something that should be part and parcel of a CS > student life (or any computer scientist for that matter). They should > LOVE programming rather than see it as a chore. I'm listening to an > audible book, Hacker Ethics, and these hackers simply find a thrill in > accomplishing something by programming. This is NOT the case for most > CS students. Sayang! Admittedly there is only so much that people in the academe can do to remedy this situation. Perhaps we can give them a gentler introduction to programming than the norm, let them see how enjoyable the craft of programming can be. Maybe more graphic-oriented interactive languages? I once saw a programming course for children that taught Java programming by using it to control a ladybug running around the screen. Problems involved controlling the ladybug to move in certain ways, and how to move it around motivated common programming tasks and problems. -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
