[3795] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: Foxtrot
ghudson@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sat Apr 24 15:22:49 1993
> well, think of trying to explain C and all of its intricacies to a student
> at that [high school] level . . . .
Awww, the poor widdle high school students.
Towards the end of my senior year in high school I did some teaching in a
student club called "Club C". I and a few other people ran some after-school
classes in C programming once a week. The people in the classes had some
trouble picking up the syntax--no more than your average 1.00 student at MIT,
really--and understanding data types, but absolutely no trouble declaring
variables, writing functions, and so forth. They didn't even stumble too
hard over pointers, although I couldn't be sure just how well they learned
them, since we ran up against the end of the school year.
Unless my high school was full of geniuses (and these students didn't seem
like geniuses to me), I think that C is by no means too difficult to teach
to high school students who have never programmed before.
My major gripe with traditional programming courses is that the ones which
use real programming languages (Pascal or C, instead of something like
BASIC) generally don't teach students to write robust code. One advantage
of Scheme is that it has built-in string handling, and that lists have no
built-in length limits. Your average 6.001 problem set solutionm will work
for just about any input, wihle your average 1.00 problem set solution will
happily lose if you overrun its static arrays.
But this is all napalm material; I'll shut up now.
