[Year 12 SofDev] Industry practice - tertiary links

[Mark Kelly]

Yes - and we have to position VCE against VET, which is the more 
practical, work-oriented stream.

Frankly, I can't see SD being directly useful in providing students with 
workplace skills.  It's simply not deep enough in programming skills - 
and it could never be in the time available.  And by the time the kids 
took the tram from school to their first job, the entire IT industry 
would have had three technological revolutions in the meantime, so any 
language they learned would have been superseded.

I see SD as giving students a taste of the mindset of software 
development, to be developed later at uni or TAFE.

2.2c worth, and falling against the Yen.

Timmer-Arends wrote:
> I have to say that this discussion is heading to Comp Sci circa 1990 (which
> is not necessarily a bad thing) 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?
> 
> Regards
> Robert T-A
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Steven Bird" <sb at csse.unimelb.edu.au>
> To: "Year 12 Software Development Teachers' Mailing List"
> <sofdev at edulists.com.au>
> Sent: Thursday, April 17, 2008 10:41 AM
> Subject: Re: [Year 12 SofDev] Industry practice - tertiary links
> 
> 
>> [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/
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-- 
Mark Kelly
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