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What is your ideal programming education ?
Recently trying to teach my younger brother (CS freshman in Canadian university) programming and having that devolving into a yelling session (kicked the dog there) left me wondering about the state of programming education.
How is this CW?
Because in any discussion of any type of education system there is an undercurrent disagreement between the blank slatists and the "IQ believers (or whatever this group is called)".
How to teach something can also be split along CW lines. See common core, phonics vs whole language, etc.
On top of that there is the group representation angle. Certain groups of people are disproportionately represented in programming professions.
My thoughts/priors on the points above
I think IQ is very obviously correlated with programming ability, I think this is the default prior of anyone who believes in the predictive usefulness of IQ. However, I would go a step ahead and say that a very specific type of intelligence that probably correlates with IQ score, but is distinct is along certain dimensions could be a better predictor of programming ability. See Dehnadis work.
My personal observation is that all good programmers I know show signs of high intelligence but not everyone who shows signs of high intelligence shows programming aptitude proportional to their intelligence. I am not entirely sure if its a "wordcel vs shape rotator" issue, the dichotomy isn't as obvious as is with Electrical Engineering for example.
I have come across two fairly distinct methods of teaching programming. I would classify them as 'trying to impart intuition' vs. 'trying to impart knowledge.'
The former consists of teaching via gamified methods where students are made to play elaborate games consisting of programming puzzles, modify existing code to draw out 2-d shapes and animations, etc. Once students develop some familiarity with changing words in a file to make the computer do something, they are introduced to data types, data structures, control flow, etc.
The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former.
I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.
Obvious racial stratification. But I think putting that aside, the gender stratification is worth more discussion. Even the best discussions I could find on the topic simply boils down to "differences interest". I think that isn't the complete picture.
I really don't want to do women dirty like this but, I have yet to come across a "good" female programmer. I really don't know what it is at the root of this. My superficial intuition is that a certain aspect of becoming a good programmer is just relentlessness. Sometimes you need to try out 100 different bug fixes and read through 50 stack overflow and obscure forum posts to fix a certain problem or get something working. Men in my experience are much much more willing to swim through the stack overflow and debugger sewers than women.
But that isn't the entire picture, I just don't see women writing naturally good code, if that even is a term. And by that I mean the code a person rights with the knowledge of the fundamentals but no knowledge of coding best practices such as separation of concerns, lose coupling, etc. Men in my experience naturally tended to write "better" code without prior knowledge. A lot of the female students I taught used to roll their eyes when being explained good practices.
Intuition vs Knowledge
Programming is hard. Teaching it is also hard. Beginner tutorials tend to have an order of more magnitude views than advanced tutorials.
I am sure that the intuition based teaching methods were born out of frustration with the fact that students couldn't connect the pieces together despite being aware of all the pieces and how they work. But having seen it first hand, I just don't understand how it can teach someone programming at all.
My brother knows how to draw a submarine and make it sway up and down but doesn't know that
voidmeans nothing. He is being made to write out words without knowing what they mean and of course its all served in a bowl of global variable spaghetti. The professor chose dumbed down Java 2-d animation package called Processing to teach the class. The documentation is horrendous, its a shadow of what Java is. Why not just use Java? Or even python??This is very much madness from my pov. Changing lines in code the way the students in my brothers class are being made to do is so far removed from the act of programming or even the primitives of programming that I am left wondering if the "vibes" people have gotten their noses in there as well.
I was taught much differently with an introduction to compilers, data types, conditionals, etc. All of it in C, and despite using python for 99% of my word, I am eternally grateful for having started with C.
It is so much of an over-correction from what I assume is the traditional way of teaching programming that I just can't wrap my mind around it, It might pass for school children but University? I mean I get it even MIT is teaching intro to CS in Python, but at least they are still teaching the actual language and not some bastardchild of it.
I think the fact of the matter might be that demand for CS degrees far exceeds requirement for CS practitioners. The universities are not being honest to their students and are making it all seem like a game in a with the hope that it will all work out for some reason.
Edit - To further clarify why I think the intuition based method is ineffective.
Intuition is hard to impart.
Here's the submarine example from my brothers class with some more detail. The question asks for "Make the submarine sway up and down in a wave and go from left to right".
To even a notice programmer it is immediately obvious that this means the x-coordinates need to be incremented every frame and the y coordinates are just sin(x). That intuition is abstracted behind a 2-d animation task. This is adding in excessive intellectual baggage, its not necessary to anyone who understands a loop.
Valuable time is being wasted on making 2-d shapes do things as opposed to knowing the tools that make them do things. I could solve the submarine problem instantly because I know what a loop is.
I'll just say I've known a number of excellent women programmers. My personal opinion is that the main issue is just different interests (and often other options). Research seems to support that (roughly, women are interested in people, men are interested in things), it's one of the most repeated findings with biggest effect sizes in psychology.
As to teaching CS, I can't really remember what worked well for me. My sense is to focus on solving problems, and building out the world of tools, knowledge, and techniques that allow you to solve larger and more complex problems. I think it's important to have something concrete to attach abstract things to when learning. But that's just a first thought.
I’ll second the “excellent women programmers” thing; though I am not in tech, I am dating a woman who is as far as I can tell “good” at programming (graduated from Carnegie Mellon roughly in the middle of the CS cohort), and she tells me that there was at least one woman in her cohort who was brilliant enough that her professors described her entering industry as “a great loss to academia”.
That said, she also describes that women were an overwhelming minority, that the entry class was 50/50 M/F but very quickly all the women left, and she’s…well, not happy, but willing, to bang her head against a programming problem for ages without apparently making any progress. (She is quite neurotic, though, and had to really work through that during her undergrad.)
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