{"id":616,"date":"2011-09-15T13:46:47","date_gmt":"2011-09-15T13:46:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=616"},"modified":"2011-09-15T13:46:47","modified_gmt":"2011-09-15T13:46:47","slug":"like-an-express-train-with-me-standing-at-the-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/?p=616","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Like an express train, with me standing at the platform&#8230;&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In universities we teach programming at a breakneck speed, even if we think that we are doing it fairly gently. Contrast the teaching of programming with the teaching of mathematics. If we taught programming the way that we taught basic mathematics, then we would spend a few hours a week for several <em>years<\/em> doing basic drill-and-practice on programming constructs: a few hundred for loops, a few thousand if statements, and so on, all in isolation before we even think of bringing it together. Why on earth should we believe that we can teach something of comparable complexity in a couple of terms of a-few-hours-a-week courses.<\/p>\n<p>Why do we have this irrational exuberance in our ability to teach programming so quickly? Do we believe that it builds on transferrable skills that have been learned by that point? That students at that age (and, who have elected and been selected to do computer science or a similar subject) are capable of coping with the pace? That programming is vastly easier than these mathematical skills? That we try to teach the mathematical skills at a much too early age?<\/p>\n<p>I wonder if this is why we occasionally get student feedback comments that are like the one we got many years ago: &#8220;the course is like an express train, with me still standing at the platform&#8221;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In universities we teach programming at a breakneck speed, even if we think that we are doing it fairly gently. Contrast the teaching of programming with the teaching of mathematics. If we taught programming the way that we taught basic mathematics, then we would spend a few hours a week for several years doing basic [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[14,22,31],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=616"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":617,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616\/revisions\/617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/colinjohnson.me.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}