Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

["chris.danx" <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com>]

"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