[Year 12 SofDev] Industry practice - tertiary links

[andrew barry]

My email did come across as a little harsh reading back.
The point is the IT subject enrollment is declining in numbers.
Last i looked there was zero 0 jobs for IT teachers in secondary.

My contract ends term2 and so naturally I am annoyed at the status quo but
things might pick up who knows.

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Steven Bird <sb at csse.unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:

> [Adrian -- thanks for picking a more appropriate subject line now that
> discussion has moved away from data flow diagrams.]
>
> On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 7:28 PM, andrew barry <jagguy999 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I prefer to just teach an IT subject which is just programming and some
> > programming design eg psuedo code.
>
> I agree.  Students should learn how to walk before learning how to
> run, i.e. they should be competent with "programming in-the-small"
> before they spend much time on "programming in-the-large" (incl SDLC).
>
> > Including so much theory doesn't get any student excited about learning
> IT
> > at Uni. After all we are trying to promote IT beyond yr12 are we not?
> Are we
> > not trying to get more people to do it?
>
> I agree with Adrian that rigour is important, and this cuts across
> analysis, design, implementation, documentation, etc.  The SDLC is one
> source of theory but I question its suitability at this level.  It's
> intended for software engineering projects where you have to manage
> whole teams of developers, client relationships, project deliverables,
> etc.  When students aren't already experienced at small-scale
> programming the emphasis often falls on a rather heavy document
> process, which has to be one of the least exciting aspects of software
> development.
>
> Another issue I have with the emphasis on SDLC as a major source of
> theoretical content is that it focusses too much on the software
> development process.  Of course that's entirely appropriate given the
> title of the subject, but there's some other areas of computing theory
> that would be useful and accessible at this level, including
> algorithmic problem solving and the limits of computing.  Here's a
> couple of introductory books that cover these topics in a
> non-mathematical yet rigorous and intellectually stimulating way:
>
> Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing (3rd Ed, David Harel, Addison
> Wesley, 2004)
>
> Computers Ltd: What They Really Can't Do (David Harel, Oxford
> University Press, 2000)
>
> -Steven Bird
> http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/~sb/<http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/%7Esb/>
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