Professor Questions Sink-Or-Swim Intro To CS Courses 606
theodp writes "After having taught introductory programming (CS 1) for the past six years,' writes GVSU's Zack Kurmas, 'and having watched many students struggle through this course and the subsequent course (CS 2), I have come to the conclusion that it is absurd to expect students who don't have any prior programming experience to be well prepared to study Computer Science after a single 15-week course (i.e., CS 1). I believe that expecting a student to learn to program well enough to study Computer Science in a single 15-week course is almost as absurd as expecting a student with no instrumental musical experience to be ready to join the university orchestra after 15 weeks.' Kurmas' frustrations are not unlike those voiced by Physics professor Dr. Yung Tae Kim, who argues the up-or-out, one-size-fits-all rigid pace approach to learning set by teachers and administrators is as absurd as telling a toddler, 'You have ten weeks to walk, and if you can't, you get an F and you're not allowed to try to walk anymore."
Re:WHy are you majoring in CS... (Score:3, Informative)
for universities to make this a prerequisite
You want universities to not accept CS students because they didn't take a programming course in high school?
Well id be fucked because my high school didn't offer any programming besides "Web Programming".
So if a student comes from a school that cant afford a real programming course then they just aren't good enough for you? Fuck you. Prick.
Re:WHy are you majoring in CS... (Score:3, Informative)
Translation: "I'm justifying all my time spent (and think I should've spent instead of partying) and show how I'm expert of my field. I assume everybody will have put the same (specific) effort into acquiring these obscurities that I pride myself with. Look at the size of my intellectual reproductional organ.
This gets worse, once people also have to justify their time and their costs (wages). Welcome to the intellectual industry, where once you understand the field-lingo, you understand it's often just the game of acquiring the lingo and it's (lack of) signifance.
Re:WHy are you majoring in CS... (Score:3, Informative)
I haven't used Calculus or Physics since college. What a waste of time that could have been spent helping me learn to write... robots, speech recognition, video recognition, OCR... You know PROGRAMMING stuff.
So, um, how do you think we write computer programs that deal with the uncertainty involved in robotics, speech recognition, video processing, and OCR? The most successful approaches involve optimizing various objective functions with respect to (possibly labeled) data, which almost always involves either climbing (or descending) a gradient to some optimum, or (in Bayesian approaches) integrating out certain parameters. How are you going to do these things without calculus? Your professors were trying to give you the foundation to do these cool things.