Re: Improving the first contact with Ada

[Georg Bauhaus <rm-host.bauhaus@maps.futureapps.de>]

On 6/13/10 7:26 PM, zeta_no wrote:

> To be sure you understand my point here, I see this type of tutorial
> as something that can be quite long and involving.  Rarely you can
> find that type of a document, that does not qualify as a book nor as a
> quick and dirty tutorial, as being organized halfway between a master
> thesis and a final year thesis.  It treats a known subject (compared
> with the master thesis), with solid knowledge and neat understanding
> (compared with some final year thesis).  These documents are great
> starters to light up curiosity and understanding to then permit
> austere books to sink in.

Indeed, there is an opportunity to set up an Ada teaching project in
the much needed style of Touch of Class (ETH Z�rich) or similar.
Much needed if it is true that CS education is no longer a sufficient
credential for some industries.  A teaching project could extend
across several semesters, can include virtual production
scenarios, require teams, will start from a larger and serious
piece of software (to be written by university staff) and
include a collection of non-accidental hardware.
This can be fun (model trains is an example, I imagine there are
others, equally realistic and equally affordable).  I mean, we
get to read about pressure sensors and thermometers all the time.
But are the real things part of CS proper?

As a modest example, I guess, it will be both possible and
instructive to teach a  sorting algorithm that runs on a
microcontroller. But you cannot, I think, teach that in one week!

(Thinking further, it might be necessary to not be too specific
in the project, since being specific means being exclusive
and you loose your audience:

- doesn't have to be control software requiring 2 years of soldering
   and quantum effects;
- a banking scenario offers enough to engage students for years,
   you might kill the project, though, by asking for 1 year experience
   in enterprise accounting;
- if there is a number crunching department, then there might be
   modules that need to be written and that can be written without
   a degree in math, but whose effect is seen in a larger computing
   effort (it is demonstrably difficult to find mathematicians who
   can even imagine that students from other departments find math
   more difficult than they do, so the tasks would have to be
   chosen to meet either need))

Do professors like it?  Will they be allowed to do it?
I can't say whether university management can consider anything but
the latest style of measuring university reputation, such as
number of publications with "impact".  If it turns out that
industry as a whole will like successful teaching as much as
anything else, this should encourage larger teaching projects.

The purpose of the Bologna process in Europe is to establish
a "European degree". I'd think that a long term CS project
offers an interesting teaching instrument. It even achieves
measurable success, and can be re-adjusted when needed,
without anyone needing to feel bad.