Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Kent Paul Dolan]

Here, from a posting in comp.lang.logo, is a viewpoint entirely
different from mine (and probably lots more valid) on what it takes to
engage the mind of CS students today.  Can Ada be wedged in here
somehow, or extended with libraries to make the stuff described here
possible for new Ada programmers?



http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/17/CACM_Nintendo_Generation.pdf

FYI.

xanthian.


-- 
Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Mr Adam G Craggs]

I guess as you metion ADA you must be wanting to use it in your teaching. As i
think the areas which are metioned in your attachment could be covered by
other languages/environments more easily (eg. flash ...). I have seen some
interesting work with ada to teach programming.

But it depends on what part of programming you would like to teach.

An example project analysing a web log: I have done this when I was fairly new
to ada using a simple graphics library. Part 1 was just text based reading in
an input file of websites visited and writing out various stats. Part 2
drawing various charts with the graphics library.

For example as part of a small group of programmers - 5 we implemented a
programming teaching tool. Although this is not based in Ada I did see some
ada wrappers doing a similar sort of thing as part of the reasearch i did on
the web before starting it.

The main idea was to teach control flow so if else, loop, conditions in and
event based environment using a robot, and a graphical environment for
programming this was going to be a public exibit so no typing was alowed it
had to be fast and easy to use. To build the robot we used a lego kit called
lego mindstorms. But maybe if you want people to type the programs as was the
case with the ada wrappers then thats great.

I think if the effort is made many things are possible and i am sure rewards
will be seen. A simple example is extrapolating from the situation one of my
lecturers used to talk about spanners and this made people laugh alot and i am
sure they rememebered more of what he said than someone who just went straight
into explanations of librarys and such.

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

> Here, from a posting in comp.lang.logo, is a viewpoint entirely
> different from mine (and probably lots more valid) on what it takes to
> engage the mind of CS students today.  Can Ada be wedged in here
> somehow, or extended with libraries to make the stuff described here
> possible for new Ada programmers?
>
> http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/17/CACM_Nintendo_Generation.pdf
>
> FYI.
>
> xanthian.
>
> --
> Posted via Mailgate.ORG Server - http://www.Mailgate.ORG

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Richard Riehle]

When I started teaching Ada at Naval Postgraduate
School, the number of students enrolling for the
class was so low it was not guaranteed there would
be a class.

With the help of a friendly professor who had been
there for a long time, we were able to put together
enough for one class.

After that class, students began to tell other students
about how much fun Ada was.   We are ever so
gradually making progress at increasing mind-share,
as the caption put it.

My class is called, Ada As A Second Language, so the
students have almost all suffered through the horrors
of C++ by the time they get to me.    The sign on my
office door says, "C++ Is Its Own Virus" and few
of my students disagree with that sentiment.

Just today, one of my students from the electrical engineering
curriculum said how much he was enjoying Ada.    I have even
been able to persuade some students to use Ada for their
Master's Degree Thesis.

At lunch today, with a group of Marines from one of my other
classes, and one Marine visitor, the visitor mentioned how
some project was being converted from Ada to Java.   I said,
"That's a pretty stupid decision."    He asked, "What would be
better?"   I replied, "Ada 95."  He said that everything he had
heard about Ada was pretty negative.    This is an indication
that there is still a lot of ignorance out there in the decision
loop.

We can, if we teach Ada well, grab some mind-share.  However,
if the students are confronted with negative attitudes when they
try to use Ada (or recommend Ada) once they have graduated,
it is pretty discouraging.    On the bright side, some of my
students will be in decision-making jobs when they graduate,
and they may be able to help turn the tide of stupidity that
characterizes so many programming language decisions.

If you can teach Ada well and help the students enjoy it, all
the better.   I am seeing the results of teaching it badly in
so many places.

By the way, I expect to have an update of my little booklet,
Ada Distilled, available for free download sometime in the
next couple of weeks.   I have been getting great feedback on
it from all over the world.    Apparently it has become useful
for a lot of people who are trying to learn Ada on their own.
I will announce it here when it was on adapower and adaic.org.

Richard Riehle

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Adrian Hoe]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message news:<3CEB102E.75D7D32@adaworks.com>...
> When I started teaching Ada at Naval Postgraduate
> School, the number of students enrolling for the
> class was so low it was not guaranteed there would
> be a class.
> 
> With the help of a friendly professor who had been
> there for a long time, we were able to put together
> enough for one class.
> 
> After that class, students began to tell other students
> about how much fun Ada was.   We are ever so
> gradually making progress at increasing mind-share,
> as the caption put it.
> 
> My class is called, Ada As A Second Language, so the
> students have almost all suffered through the horrors
> of C++ by the time they get to me.    The sign on my
> office door says, "C++ Is Its Own Virus" and few
> of my students disagree with that sentiment.
> 
> Just today, one of my students from the electrical engineering
> curriculum said how much he was enjoying Ada.    I have even
> been able to persuade some students to use Ada for their
> Master's Degree Thesis.
> 
> At lunch today, with a group of Marines from one of my other
> classes, and one Marine visitor, the visitor mentioned how
> some project was being converted from Ada to Java.   I said,
> "That's a pretty stupid decision."    He asked, "What would be
> better?"   I replied, "Ada 95."  He said that everything he had
> heard about Ada was pretty negative.    This is an indication
> that there is still a lot of ignorance out there in the decision
> loop.
> 
> We can, if we teach Ada well, grab some mind-share.  However,
> if the students are confronted with negative attitudes when they
> try to use Ada (or recommend Ada) once they have graduated,
> it is pretty discouraging.    On the bright side, some of my
> students will be in decision-making jobs when they graduate,
> and they may be able to help turn the tide of stupidity that
> characterizes so many programming language decisions.
> 
> If you can teach Ada well and help the students enjoy it, all
> the better.   I am seeing the results of teaching it badly in
> so many places.

I was having negative feedback from a local university in Malaysia,
UTM, the only university here that teach Ada. Mainly, the students
can't see the benefits of Ada and are obfuscated by promotion and
words of mouth. The lecturer came to me and asked for some suggestion
how he can introduce Ada more successfully. Judging that his
confidence had been shaken, I told him to stick to Ada and show his
confident to his students and be more persistent. I also told him to
provide comparisons between Ada and other languages. He did it and his
confident is back on again. :) He now will ask students who are not
convinced in Ada to compete with his students who learn Ada. And the
result is great.


> By the way, I expect to have an update of my little booklet,
> Ada Distilled, available for free download sometime in the
> next couple of weeks.   I have been getting great feedback on
> it from all over the world.    Apparently it has become useful
> for a lot of people who are trying to learn Ada on their own.
> I will announce it here when it was on adapower and adaic.org.

BTW, Richard, why not include some comparisons in your booklet? If you
need some examples, I am most willing to provide to you.

> Richard Riehle


-- 
                                       -- Adrian Hoe
                                       -- http://adrianhoe.com

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Michael Bode]

byhoe@greenlime.com (Adrian Hoe) writes:

> BTW, Richard, why not include some comparisons in your booklet? If you
> need some examples, I am most willing to provide to you.

I've found http://www.mysunrise.ch/users/gdm/pascada.htm to be very
helpful for me to get an initial understanding of where/what Ada is
relative to a language that I know.

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[chris.danx]

"Adrian Hoe" <byhoe@greenlime.com> wrote in message
news:9ff447f2.0205222034.5665a4c0@posting.google.com...

> I was having negative feedback from a local university in Malaysia,
> UTM, the only university here that teach Ada. Mainly, the students
> can't see the benefits of Ada and are obfuscated by promotion and
> words of mouth. The lecturer came to me and asked for some suggestion
> how he can introduce Ada more successfully. Judging that his
> confidence had been shaken, I told him to stick to Ada and show his
> confident to his students and be more persistent. I also told him to
> provide comparisons between Ada and other languages. He did it and his
> confident is back on again. :) He now will ask students who are not
> convinced in Ada to compete with his students who learn Ada. And the
> result is great.


Everyone here knows there's more to programming than a GUI, but new newbies
don't know that.  Almost all new newbies see gui programs and think it'd be
cool to write apps like that.  They take a course in a language and find
they're writing console programs which don't have the same appeal.  If the
concepts of programming and a bit of "shinyness" can be successfully
integrated students might be more interested.

In our first year, the first thing our lecturer did was demonstrate a GUI
based program written with the win32 binding.  This seemed to grab the
students attention, and it was maintained through the excercises they set
for us.  One involved creating a simple planetary system with a sun, planet
and moon complete with shadows (all the exerices used Adagraph, not the
win32 binding), which ppl had a lot of fun with (one guy had 9 planets and
god knows how many moons working, just for the hell of it).  Another
involved plotting a bar chart of some data read from a file.

None of them was really about graphics or guis, they were about programming
concepts but were presented in a way that made it fun and 'pleasing on the
eye'.  In second year they switched to textual programs, and the enthusiasm
for programming seemed much less than it was in first year.  Second year
(Ada) programming courses are about data structures, algortithms and
Software designs concepts (generics, OO...), but that doesn't mean they
couldn't have come up with exercises that use graphical elements to keep
interest (it just takes some imagination).  Perhaps that might have offset
the slightly increased difficulty of the exercises.  Of course there is
always the danger of students focusing more on the aesthetic quality of the
program, but hopefully by making the graphical element relatively simple
(and by getting tutors to keey an eye on students) that could be avoided
(the graphical elements could also be weighted much less, like 1 (or 0)
mark(s) for the whole exerice and 9 for the rest).


Just a thought,
Chris

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Bill Tate]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message news:<3CEB102E.75D7D32@adaworks.com>...
[snip]
> After that class, students began to tell other students
> about how much fun Ada was.   We are ever so
> gradually making progress at increasing mind-share,
> as the caption put it.
> ....
> My class is called, Ada As A Second Language, so the
> students have almost all suffered through the horrors
> of C++ by the time they get to me.    The sign on my
> office door says, "C++ Is Its Own Virus" and few
> of my students disagree with that sentiment.
> ...
> At lunch today, with a group of Marines from one of my other
> classes, and one Marine visitor, the visitor mentioned how
> some project was being converted from Ada to Java.   I said,
> "That's a pretty stupid decision."    He asked, "What would be
> better?"   I replied, "Ada 95."  He said that everything he had
> heard about Ada was pretty negative.    This is an indication
> that there is still a lot of ignorance out there in the decision
> loop.
> 
The posts above make a number of good suggestions but I would strongly
advise backing up even earlier.  I would point to the objectives of
the Python community's CPE (Computer programming for everyone)
initiative.  It seeks to get people exposed to computer programming
well before they reach college.  If Ada is going to achieve "greater"
mindshare (for all the right reasons), it would seem to me that you
have to deal with the difficult problem of overcoming some really bad
software development habits learned by programmers very early on,
e.g., pre-college.

Ada strongly encourages greater discipline in the "engineering" of
software; not the kind of attitude typically exhibited by those of the
"hacker" and "design-by-keyboard" persuasion (to my great
disappointment - I include no small number of CS graduates in this
crowd).  Mix that with a seemingly endless supply of individuals who
believe themselves to possess "god-like" abilities when it comes to
their software development prowess and everything points to the need
for early intervention.  Of course, there is the "cold turkey"
approach of throwing 100K SLOC of C++ code in front of potential
adopters and telling them to "maintain it." :>)

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[tmoran]

> exercises that use graphical elements to keep interest
  How about audio or video (doesn't every PC these days have a cheap
microphone and webcam?).  Making the moons whirl around the live
image of the instructor's head would seem a nice challenge. ;)

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[chris.danx]

<tmoran@acm.org> wrote in message
news:FL9H8.99$1w4.27603166@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com...

> Making the moons whirl around the live
> image of the instructor's head would seem a nice challenge. ;)

:) That reminds me of another exercise they set for us, landing a rocket on
a pad, although I have no idea why mention of our instructors should remind
of rockets :)  Our lecturer, Quintin offered a crate of beer to the person
who completed the landing in the fastest time over the whole module.  That
seemed to be a great motivator and stimulated alot of interest in
programming.  :D


Chris

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Marc A. Criley]

Bill Tate wrote:
> 
>   Mix that with a seemingly endless supply of individuals who
> believe themselves to possess "god-like" abilities when it comes to
> their software development prowess and everything points to the need
> for early intervention.

Every programmer thinks they're above average.

Half of them are wrong.

:-)  :-)  :-)


Marc A. Criley

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Jean-Marc Bourguet]

"Marc A. Criley" <mcqada95@earthlink.net> writes:

> Bill Tate wrote:
> > 
> >   Mix that with a seemingly endless supply of individuals who
> > believe themselves to possess "god-like" abilities when it comes to
> > their software development prowess and everything points to the need
> > for early intervention.
> 
> Every programmer thinks they're above average.
> 
> Half of them are wrong.

More than half.  I think you are confusing average and median.

-- 
Jean-Marc

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Marin David Condic]

But most programmers have more than the average (mean) number of legs. Maybe
we just need to mix some Integer and Floating point numbers to make every
programmer above average? :-)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Marc A. Criley" <mcqada95@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3CEE22EA.E24736D9@earthlink.net...
>
> Every programmer thinks they're above average.
>
> Half of them are wrong.
>
> :-)  :-)  :-)
>
>
> Marc A. Criley

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Preben Randhol]

On 24 May 2002 14:55:42 +0200, Jean-Marc Bourguet wrote:
> "Marc A. Criley" <mcqada95@earthlink.net> writes:
>> 
>> Every programmer thinks they're above average.
>> 
>> Half of them are wrong.
> 
> More than half.  I think you are confusing average and median.

Or less than half, depends on the distribution of your data. The
difference between the average and median can tell you some things
abouti that.

Preben

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Suzie Cube]

"Marc A. Criley" <mcqada95@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:3CEE22EA.E24736D9@earthlink.net...
> Bill Tate wrote:
> >
> >   Mix that with a seemingly endless supply of individuals who
> > believe themselves to possess "god-like" abilities when it comes to
> > their software development prowess and everything points to the need
> > for early intervention.
>
> Every programmer thinks they're above average.
>
> Half of them are wrong.
>
> :-)  :-)  :-)
>
>
> Marc A. Criley


except in Lake Wobegon.

;-) ;-) ;-)

Suzette Norby

Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Marc A. Criley]

Suzie Cube wrote:
> 
> "Marc A. Criley" <mcqada95@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> news:3CEE22EA.E24736D9@earthlink.net...
> > Bill Tate wrote:
> > >
> > >   Mix that with a seemingly endless supply of individuals who
> > > believe themselves to possess "god-like" abilities when it comes to
> > > their software development prowess and everything points to the need
> > > for early intervention.
> >
> > Every programmer thinks they're above average.
> >
> > Half of them are wrong.
> >
> > :-)  :-)  :-)
> >
> >
> > Marc A. Criley
> 
> except in Lake Wobegon.
> 
> ;-) ;-) ;-)
> 
> Suzette Norby

That is true, must be the Powdermilk Biscuits (tm) ...

Marc A. Criley
Ex-patriate Minnesotan