[Yr7-10it] Re : .. Programming for all levels

[Costello, Rob R]

people only agonise if there is something that they care deeply about 

A lot of people might dismiss other school disciplines, or suggest a
late start is not an insurmountable problem (for say LOTE, or Maths -
and ok, its not impossible to overcome) 

But we do need lots of time to master any of these fields - so need to
find that time somehow 

(yes, mandating compulsory rigour can also have problems - half digested
"familiarity" - widespread indigestion with the subject 
 
eg how many people in the community feel "what use was all that maths I
"learnt" over so many years (and how many teachers only really mastered
their field when they started to teach it?) 

Yet these teachers are legitimately passionate about their subject -
especially when they teach the 10% of students who take the advanced
subjects - and their subject won't be written off on the basis of a
magazine Q&A :) 

Maybe more flexible paths and customisation of curriculum avoids this -
? 

Now an instrumental argument: 
If one wanted, say, to work for Google, or Microsoft - rather than just
using their products - i don't think an early start would hurt 

" BILL GATES: Well, when we first started the hiring, doing university
hiring, which was all the way back in the '80s when we really started
putting a program together, we knew that we weren't looking for a
specific skill, it wasn't like, oh, do you know how to write C programs
or something like that. What we wanted was somebody who understood the
field, the idea of algorithms and programming, and that they had done
some projects that we could ask them about to get a sense of their depth
of understanding, did they really model out the whole problem and try
something.

For us it's ideal if they can learn, they don't just program in these
garbage collected languages, but they actually get some sense of, hey,
underneath it all there really is a notion of resources, memory
resources, computing resources, things like that. " 

http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~kirk/cs1510/klawe-gates-interview

one is not going to get to fluent programming in a non garbage collected
language by ignoring programming altogether - or waiting till uni to
start 

google is maybe ok with garbage collected approach - but they want the
gurus of web dev - the best software engineers in the newest techniques 

depth has its place 

:) 

Cheers 

Rob 

----------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 08:30:53 +1000
From: Cameron Bell <bell.cameron.p at edumail.vic.gov.au>
Subject: Re: [Yr7-10it] Re : .. Programming for all levels
To: "Year 7 - 10 Information Technology Teachers' Mailing List"
	<yr7-10it at edulists.com.au>
Message-ID: <46F1A31D.7090700 at edumail.vic.gov.au>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Just wondering if anyone else has read the Readers Q&A in this months
APC?
I will paraphrase as I don't have it with me.

Q: I want to get into programming but didn't do any IT or programming at
school. What language should I learn and how should I go about it?"
A: Not doing any programming at school is not a disadvantage......(goes
on)

In light of this whole thread and the agonising over languages,
methodology etc I had to chuckle.
Cheers
Cameron



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