A friend pointed out Jeff Atwood's blog at codinghorror.com. If you're not aware of Jeff, he's a co-founder of Stack Overflow and has many thought provoking articles. The one that really caught my eye is from back in 2006 called Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats. The paper mentioned (the blog links to a draft here, but look on your preferred academic repo for the final version) discusses the high rate of failure on these types of foundation programming courses and suggests that students who fail the course can be determined before they even start the course with a high degree of accuracy.
I find the following quote, like the author, quite disturbing and also a little hard to believe.
But it's still a little disturbing that the act of programming seems literally unteachable to a sizable subset of incoming computer science studentsCould it really be possible that some people simply can't be taught how to program? If so, what are the root causes to this?
Also linked to this, is the UK government's intended changes to secondary IT education to make it more computer science relevant likely to change the results if the experiment was to be rerun in a few years?
I've read that paper under the title of "The Camel has Two Humps".
ReplyDeleteMy hypothesis is that you *could* teach the goats to program, but only once you had transformed them to sheep. You need to teach them how to think, and only then can you teach them how to program.
Oh, and this template is broken - I can only get clickable links and selectable text in internet explorer....
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