[Year 12 SofDev] Industry practice - tertiary links

[Selina Dennis]

I am both a Year 12 Software Development teacher and a Computer Science
graduate - I completed my CS degree late in life, circa 2005 - and as
someone who has worked in the IT industry since 1996, I must say that I
concur with Steven Bird's view that there is a chasm between secondary
school teaching of IT and tertiary teaching of IT. For students in Year 12,
the key components of software development that they will "get the most out
of", is the theory behind algorithms, problem solving, and also the
development of their basic thinking skills. I've been teaching PHP/mySQL to
my students this year and while most have come into the course having
completed Year 10 and 11 IT, they still did not have a basic understanding
of fundamental programming concepts at the start of the year.

Perhaps this is more of a "theological" discussion on how to teach
programming to teenagers, but it's also relevant to note that much of the
theory that is being taught in Year 12 is rarely used or developed in either
tertiary study or in industry. One such example is diagrams - N-S Diagrams,
DFDs, etc have long been superseded by UML, both at a university level and
in industry - as an aside, I had never heard of NS diagrams until I had to
teach it in IPM, and I had worked with ISO-9000 compliant corporations
developing major software products.

Similarly, the SDLC, as Steven has raised, is most useful for large-scale
projects. Students will rarely experience the benefit, nor the relevance, of
the SDLC, in a secondary school curriculum. More useful theory would be a
more focused look at iterative design, extreme programming (or any other
kind of agile software development), etc, and move away from the excessive
documentation requirements that the SDLC brings to the table.

As a teacher, I would prefer to bring in key aspects of the SDLC without
having to formally teach every part of it. For example, a concentration on
testing and debugging of software - this is a twofold benefit, as it teaches
students to be aware of how they choose to implement functionality, and also
develops their analytical and observational skills when they are debugging
an error. Bringing in Use Case Diagrams instead of DFDs would be fantastic,
also, as it conceptually allows a student to think through what they are
providing in their system before they develop it.

In general, however, I have to say I am currently much happier with the core
content of the Software Development course than I was with the IT:
Applications course, but I still believe that it is, at its core, dated and
at times irrelevant. In a perfect world, we would be teaching our students
"good practice" programming while also preparing them for a future path in
IT if they so choose - both at the tertiary level and in industry.

</soapbox>

Regards,

Selina Dennis
Strathmore Secondary College

-----Original Message-----
From: sofdev-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:sofdev-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Steven Bird
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 7:01 AM
To: Year 12 Software Development Teachers' Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Year 12 SofDev] Industry practice - tertiary links

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 7:39 PM, Timmer-Arends <timmer at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
> I have to say that this discussion is heading to Comp Sci circa 1990
(which
>  is not necessarily a bad thing)

Well, CS an obvious source of theory for an IT subject.  The theory on
which VCE Physics and Chemistry is based is older still, but no-one
considers that dated.

> but it seems to me that a couple of
> questions need  to be answered first:
>  1. what do we want students to get out of a technically-oriented Y12 IT
course?
>  2. is the course primarily intended to prepare students for teritary,
work, or both?

Another conceivable answer to q2 is that it is foundational study,
preparing students for whatever they choose to do in future, even if
it involves no formal IT study or employment.

For the students continuing from VCE Software Development to a degree
in Software Engineering, we would prefer students to have a solid
grounding in algorithmic problem solving and the associated
programming skills.  (The SDLC follows naturally once they're ready to
scale up.)

-Steven
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