On 1/20/2014 9:08 AM, Roy Smith wrote:
That's a little harsh. Working in groups, and sharing code, are important parts of how software gets developed today. Those collaborative work habits should indeed be taught.
Until recently, teaching collaboration through group projects has had the problem of leeching. Asking group members to grade each other's participation and contributions does not work too well. My daughter ran into this problem in her first programming class where private-until-done 'group' work was too much her work. In her second class, there was discussion of each other's coding problems *in the class*, in front of the teacher, and she enjoyed that much more.
It is now possible to run collaboration through software that records interaction. My daughter took a composition class where discussion and review of each other's work was recorded and contributed to each person's grade. But this was not collaborative writing, which would be another level of interaction, and one which is common beyond college classes.
A programming class (probably best after the first) could use a real (meaning, used outside of classes) repository and tracker. *That* would better prepare people for later work, whether on a job or as an open-source volunteer.
-- Terry Jan Reedy -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
