It’s been a year since Jorge managed to convince me to start blogging. Things have mostly been downhill since the 15K+ views for my iPad environmental impact analysis, but that was mostly to be expected, given the media coverage around iPad at the time. Besides, many of the views are just from spammers. However, truth be told, most of my personal favourite posts such as the Tragedy of the Commons 4-part series and Peddling an idea were written when I used to spend more time thinking about and writing posts.
Thoughts on programming for all: Part IIb — Downsides
Last week, I discussed one of the downsides of students being taught to think algorithmically, even if they absorb it all. Unfortunately, just because students can pass an introduction to programming course doesn’t mean they have any understanding of code that they or anyone else has written. Whenever I teach a course, I make a point to mention cargo cult programming and warn students not to fall into that trap.
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Thoughts on programming for all: Part IIa — Downsides
In my last post, I wrote about some of the benefits of teaching programming as part of a general liberal arts education. However, I did express some new reservations about doing so which I explore further in this blog post. Having let quite a bit of time elapse since writing the first post, I’ve unfortunately forgotten a number of points I had intended to make. And now, I’m going to break up the downsides into multiple posts.
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