What are they teaching the kids these days!?

What are they teaching the kids these days, or is there simply an ADHD pandemic?

It seems that practically every other post on the boards is along the lines of "OMFG loops lolwut?" asking really basic (so basic even I know the answer) questions that should have been covered before the assignment was given.

There also seems to be a real reluctance to *gasp* write some code to see if you can get anywhere near the result required before posting. Some of the posts probably took longer to post than it would have taken them to solve the problem in the first place.

Either these people just aren't paying attention in class, or turned up to the wrong class and are now wondering what a char array has to do with "Beach Studies".

The point of this post?......Let my Ritalin kick in and I'll explain.





Oh look, a cow.......

ADHD may have something to do with it, but I suspect that a larger part of it is that everyone nowadays are trying to become a programmer, Software Engineer or whatever you call it. There are literally thousand and thousands of courses in all countries. So if you have many thousands of students, we can expect some of them to turn to here.

And there are always people in every class that try to find an easy way out.

I agree, writing proper English is a basic requirement to be in the computer profession. Using text-style writing and stuffing a three-letter abbreviation with no actual meaning to it in every sentence doesn't add much to the "this person sounds like he/she knows what he/she is talking about".

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Mats

u guyz no wat ur talkin about.

i have a doubt, please give me the codez i need my phd

On a serious note, "Technical documentation for Software Engineers" (has lots of English) is a core unit at my uni for a reason :-)

They are teaching kids these days to sing, dance and steal things. They never actually learn how to solve programming problems.

Perhaps since the requisite knowledge base of computer use has grown exponentially over the past 30 years, it's difficult for a teacher to cram everything in. They now have to hurry and race through the course.

Back in the 70's when I learned programming using BASIC, the classes started out explaining base-2 arithmetic thoroughly, logic gates, designing half-adders, adders, shifters, etc. using gates, flip-flops. You didn't touch a program until weeks later. Even simple computer architecture was touched on. Memory concepts. Registers. Arithmetic/Logic units.

Much time was spent learning data representation; how the real world problems are broken down to numerical abstractions, and why exactly would this tool to do rapid calculations be of any use in the real world. How every-day problems can be represented in flow-charts (like a recipe), how games like Xs and Os, or chess, might be managed in terms of algebra and matrices.

The student came away with a good appreciation of the complexity of transforming real-world problems into computerese... In addition, they'd be armed with the smarts to be able to interpret the results and make common sense sanity checks as opposed to just believing everything a computer spits out.

I seriously think all that fundamental comprehension is simply skipped over today. Just start coding willy-nilly. Yeah I must be old. I'm using phrases like willy-nilly.

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Originally Posted by zacs7

u guyz no wat ur talkin about.

i have a doubt, please give me the codez i need my phd

On a serious note, "Technical documentation for Software Engineers" (has lots of English) is a core unit at my uni for a reason :-)

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You missed out: "Hi - i can do cout<<"hello world" what do i need to no for making a game like quake? kthxbai"

But it is good to see that there is hope for the future (unless you use your core unit book to wedge the door open on hot days :) ).

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Originally Posted by laserlight

They are teaching kids these days to sing, dance and steal things. They never actually learn how to solve programming problems.

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Those pesky vocational courses!

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Originally Posted by nonoob

Perhaps since the requisite knowledge base of computer use has grown exponentially over the past 30 years, it's difficult for a teacher to cram everything in. They now have to hurry and race through the course.

Back in the 70's when I learned programming using BASIC, the classes started out explaining base-2 arithmetic thoroughly, logic gates, designing half-adders, adders, shifters, etc. using gates, flip-flops. You didn't touch a program until weeks later.

I seriously think all that fundamental comprehension is simply skipped over today. Just start coding willy-nilly. Yeah I must be old. I'm using phrases like willy-nilly.

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I think it's all down to the instant gratification - everything now! mentality that we have in society (apparently it is all MTV's fault). And it's not helped by titles such as "Learn C++ in 24 Hours". As for "adders, shifters, etc. using gates, flip-flops." nowadays with the power of google you'd get some interesting code by using these:

http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:...rendTypeId%3D4
http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:..._streetrod.jpg
http://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:...rance-gate.jpg
http://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:...flip-flops.jpg

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Originally Posted by nonoob

Perhaps since the requisite knowledge base of computer use has grown exponentially over the past 30 years, it's difficult for a teacher to cram everything in. They now have to hurry and race through the course.

Back in the 70's when I learned programming using BASIC, the classes started out explaining base-2 arithmetic thoroughly, logic gates, designing half-adders, adders, shifters, etc. using gates, flip-flops. You didn't touch a program until weeks later. Even simple computer architecture was touched on. Memory concepts. Registers. Arithmetic/Logic units.

Much time was spent learning data representation; how the real world problems are broken down to numerical abstractions, and why exactly would this tool to do rapid calculations be of any use in the real world. How every-day problems can be represented in flow-charts (like a recipe), how games like Xs and Os, or chess, might be managed in terms of algebra and matrices.

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Except that's exactly how it's structured at my uni, even in 2009 for all IT related degrees but spread across a few units.

In other words, all hope is not lost. I guess the problem occurs when English professors decide they might want to become programming teachers.

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Originally Posted by laserlight

They are teaching kids these days to sing, dance and steal things.

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Who are teaching the kids? Is singing and dancing a bad thing? Care to elaborate? :D

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Originally Posted by happyclown

Who are teaching the kids?

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Jason Mraz ;)

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Originally Posted by laserlight

They are teaching kids these days to sing, dance and steal things.

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In other words, you mean that kids are being taught to express themselves in unusual ways, flexibly adjust their position in space while obeying certain rules and finally be able to make a living ;-)

The kids are all wrong, as they always have been. And this is a Good Thing: it allows them either to make a distinction between good and bad, or teach us a better way.

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They never actually learn how to solve programming problems.

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I agree that this is definitely a disadvantage. "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense" (John McCarthy?)

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I seriously think all that fundamental comprehension is simply skipped over today.

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During my second year at university, we were supposed to build a CPU only using the simplest logic gates (i.e. implement the DLX instruction set using FPGAs) including instruction fetching, decoding, AU, LU and so on, debugging the whole thing, then write an assembler that would translate mnemocode into machine code, then use the assembler to implement IEEE 754 binary floating point multiplication, then use C to implement a C0-compiler for our assembler and target architecture (DLX), where C0 is mainly Pascal with the syntax borrowed from C. The total duration of the course was three weeks. My university focuses on algorithmic theory, the hardware stuff is just bonus.

I don't know what kind of universities you have in mind, but over here we're working pretty hard. On the other hand, our professors are constantly making jokes about the sluggish situation especially at American universities.

Greets,
Philip

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The total duration of the course was three weeks.

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Dang that's pretty good - I wish my school was more like that. Over here it seems like it's all busy work and I'm just doing it for a piece of paper.

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Originally Posted by zacs7

u guyz no wat ur talkin about.

i have a doubt, please give me the codez i need my phd

On a serious note, "Technical documentation for Software Engineers" (has lots of English) is a core unit at my uni for a reason :-)

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We had to take 3 count them 1 2 3 classes on technical writing. I really don't know what the ........ the administrators have in mind for where this is going, but no where good I can say. America has lost its technologcal lead to countries that 50 years ago where part of the 3rd world. It's time we got it back.