TITLE: Sweating The Small Stuff
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: March 09, 2009  3:26 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
On Learning Curves, I read a
<A HREF="http://learningcurves.blogspot.com/2009/03/in-class-today.html">
   lament</A>
about calculus students having a hard time putting
their skills into practice on some basic word
problems.  This line stood out:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
They can do the calculus.  The algebra slays them.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Of late, our CS faculty have been discussing a
programming corollary.  Students have passed their
intro programming course and a data structures
course.  They get to an intermediate programming
course, or a programming languages course, or an
AI course, where they learn some more advanced
design idea or algorithm.  They answer conceptual
courses about the material on exams and do well.
Then they try to write code...  and hit a wall.

Sometimes a new programming language gets in the
way, but sometimes not -- students are using a
language they used for a year in the intro
sequence.  And whether it's a new language or
an old one, the problems seem ticky-tack:
semicolons, declarations, function calls.

They can talk about the advanced concepts, but
simple programming tasks to implement the ideas
slays them.  The programming part looks like
attention to detail to me, or effort spent to
internalize basic grammar and vocabulary.  One
prof half-jokingly says his students have gone
out of their way to forget what they already
knew.

You don't really know programming unless you
can write a program from a real problem, and
not just a tightly-specified exercise designed
by the instructor.  And I'm not sure you can
really know a concept -- not in the way that
a computer scientist needs to know it -- unless
you can write a program using it for a real
problem.  If syntax is in the way, you simply
need to buckle down and learn the syntax.

I don't have any answers on this but thought
it was interesting that a calculus prof is
running into the same kind of problem.
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