[prog] Who were your best CompSci teachers?

[Jimen Ching]

On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Andrea Landaker wrote:
>Are you going to exclude everyone who didn't have a chance to learn
>programming in high school from getting a CS degree?

Of course not.  That's why I mentioned community college.  Yes, I am in
the states, Hawaii to be exact.  And, yes, even here, community colleges
are basically a hobby school for seniors.  It might actually be a good
idea to teach seniors to code.  They have lots of time.  ;-)  Also, if the
credit is transferable to a university, it is better to learn the material
from a community college.  Community college courses are usually cheaper.
Why pay more for the same material.  Sometimes, you might even get the
same professor as the university course.  Professors don't earn all that
much.  At least not in Hawaii.  So some moonlight by teaching at community
colleges.

It wasn't my intention to imply that Uni's should exclude anyone because
of high school limitations.  Even the University of Hawaii teach entry
level Calculus for those that didn't have a chance to take it in high
school.  All I was suggesting was that high schools should offer
programming language and algorithms classes as an advance placement course
for those who are interested in pursuing an engineering career.  At UH,
all engineers are required to learn C.  I think they are required to learn
Java now.  But the idea is the same.

The reason I think this way is because learning a programming language is
just grunt work.  I.e. write a utility to read a file.  Write a utility to
use some library function.  In my opinion, these are not University level
course material.  There are materials that are a lot more interesting.
More students might pursue their engineering career if the material was
more interesting.  This is all I was saying.

--jc
-- 
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org