On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Sasha Pachev <[email protected]> wrote:
> >One of the premises of the book is that much of > >practical knowledge cannot be transmitted by books or even >by word of > mouth > >but only through the guided experience of the master teaching >the student > >through an apprenticeship, the silversmith teaching the >apprentice, the > >pianist teaching her pupil, the biologist or chemist teaching his > >graduate student. > > Very true indeed. I would also add by doing it yourself and struggling > your way through it. In fact, no guidance from an expert teacher will > do you any good without this element. If it is not present, you are > multiplying the teacher's expertise and effort by a big fat zero. > > I remember my first encounter with C. I tried to write a simple Hello, > World program. It was before the days of Google. I was also fairly new > to the whole idea of a computer at that time - access to computers in > the Soviet Union in the early 90s was rather limited. So I sat there > for 3 hours trying different things until I figured out that I was > missing a semicolon. Superficially it looked like a waste of time, but > such frustrating exercises with the trivial helped build something > inside. You cannot pack that into a college degree, a book, or a > patent. But this something makes a difference between getting the job > done or not. > Let me ask you this. What do you think a teacher needs to do to encourage students to work on there own, especially in computer science? One young programmer who impressed me very much said that the teacher should encourage play which I totally agree with. He said that there is too much emphasis on creating trivial programs to teach concepts and that students should be allowed to work on and improve more complex programs. I think he gave Microsoft XNA Game Studio as an example. What freesoftware tools and resources would you recommend along these lines? /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
