Re: Fun with C

[Peter C. Chapin <PChapin@vtc.vsc.edu>]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2011 23:36:36 +0200, "Dmitry A. Kazakov"
<mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote:

>Why would anybody consider the Earth round? Let us start teaching students
>that the Earth is flat, after all it is a useful approximation for building
>construction. Later you can tell them that it is not very flat...

It sounds like you think that's a bad thing.

In fact when constructing a building you don't take into account the
curvature of the Earth. For example you don't use spherical trigonometry to
lay out the foundation. Students learning about building construction
certainly know (from elsewhere) that the Earth is not flat but they also
don't want to hear about it in their course.

Similarly students in an introductory physics course know that Newtonian
physics isn't the last word on the subject but they are happy to study a
more basic (and still useful) system to start.

You've said repeatedly that you are not a teacher and, frankly, it shows. I
can tell you based on my 25 years of experience teaching that attempting to
teach relativity and quantum mechanics, in any sort of significant way, to
first year physics students would be a disaster. They don't have the
mathematical background, for one thing, to handle it.

I think similar comments apply to programming education. That said, I do
agree with one point that you've made: programming languages can be a
distraction. I actually had a student recently suggest to me that we teach
our first programming course using pseudo-code instead of C (we are a
computer engineering program so C seems like the right first language). He
said, "that way students could focus on organizing their program rather
than on getting some strange code to compile."

It would be an interesting experiment to try that, but I'm not sure it
would help in the long run. In later courses I want them to write programs
that compile and work so they will need to deal with that issue sooner or
later. Which is easier to teach first? It's unclear.

Peter