TITLE: Technical Problems Are The Easy Ones
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: December 18, 2014  2:33 PM
DESC: 
-----
BODY:
Perhaps amid the daily tribulations of a software project,
Steven Baker
<A HREF="https://twitter.com/srbaker/status/545604623537410049">
   writes</A>

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 Oy.  A moving goal line, with a skeleton crew, on a shoestring
 budget.  Technical problems are the easy ones.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

And here we all sit complaining about monads and Java web
frameworks...

My big project this semester has not been developing software but
teaching beginners to develop software, in our intro course.  There
is more to Intro than programming, but for many students the tasks
of learning a language and trying to write programs comes to
dominate most everything else.  More on that soon.

Yet even with this different sort of project, I feel much as Baker
does.  Freshmen have a lot of habits to learn and un-learn, habits
that go well beyond how they do Python.  My course competes with
several others for the students' attention, not to mention with
their jobs and their lives outside of school.  They come to class
with a lifetime of experience and knowledge, as well some surprising
gaps in what they know.  A few are a little scared by college, and
many worry that CS won't be a good fit for them.

The technical problems really are the easy ones.
-----