SmartmanApps

joined 1 year ago
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When I click on it, all is I see is this 3 dots going 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3,... I can get into other Communities fine.

[–] SmartmanApps 1 points 4 months ago

That’s silly

Agreed.

This was at a university

As I said elsewhere, I had a much more sensible approach when I went to Uni - we learnt Pascal in first year, and then did OOP in second year, which follows the tradition of only teaching one concept at a time.

[–] SmartmanApps 5 points 4 months ago

Well, I'm only speaking here for my experience with teaching the U.K. curriculum, but probably the same thing applies elsewhere. I know this much - as a teacher, it's very frustrating!

[–] SmartmanApps 8 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Why do you even have to mention OOP?

Because I was saying why it's a bad choice to teach to Year 7. I already said if it was up to me I'd teach them Pascal.

C# is object oriented too

Yes, I know, but in this case it's the lesser of 2 evils, for the other reasons I gave.

Python is comparatively easier as it’s nearly literally pseudo-code

And as I just said to someone else, students even struggle with pseudo code.

e.g no need for semi-colon, brackets

And I already said that's one of the drawbacks - indenting has to be EXACT or your program doesn't work anymore.

As for indentation being exact, IMO that’s on you

It's not on me - it's in the language itself to begin with. I have no control over it.

Beginners should be given a proper development environment to work in that helps them as much as possible. Modern editors and IDEs point out syntax errors and indentation errors are incredibly basic

Now see if you can get the school admin's to install those ones. As I said, that's the root issue to begin with - the school admin's.

If they are working in an environment that doesn’t even point that out to them, they have been setup incorrectly

Now see if you can get the school admin's to fix it. Welcome to the struggle the teachers face in teaching what WE want to teach them.

[–] SmartmanApps 3 points 4 months ago

Oh! I just remembered this video. If you wanna know how students can struggle with pseudo code, watch the video. I use this video when I teach algorithms (students are even worse at that than pseudo code).

[–] SmartmanApps 8 points 4 months ago (5 children)

It looks like pseudo code

P.S. as a teacher, I can tell you I have seen students who even struggle to write pseudo code. It's like trying to teach them Greek (not all students, but some, and we need to cater to the lowest common denominator).

[–] SmartmanApps 4 points 4 months ago (6 children)

As it is, when we had to teach them HTML, the resources we were given were using PHP at the same time, so I scrapped that and just taught them HTML myself. We never teach more than one concept at a time, so I don't know how these other things found their way into the curriculum/resources.

[–] SmartmanApps 9 points 4 months ago (9 children)

I just replied to someone else with the same question. Less can go wrong (but in either case a non-OOP language, like Pascal, is a much better starting point. You should only ever teach students one concept at a time).

[–] SmartmanApps 5 points 4 months ago

Notably, when I did my C.S. degree, they knew to only teach one concept at a time. We learnt Pascal in first year, then did OOP in second year.

[–] SmartmanApps 18 points 4 months ago (28 children)
  • object-oriented (this is their FIRST proper programming language - they don't even know how to write loops yet and you want us to teach them OOP at the same time?! And as it turns out, I had one student who literally could NOT work out how to use a loop - kept writing 20 variables for 20 iterations. i.e. her variables never varied!)
  • variables are weakly-typed (use it for anything, whether it's what you first used it for or not, Python doesn't care)
  • indentation has to be exact (i.e. no brackets, just exact indentation). I had one student whose program wasn't working, and it even took ME a while to find what was wrong with it (a missing space).

I think there was more, but that's what I remember off the top of my head. If it was up to me then I would've used Pascal - that's what it's designed for! But at least C# has strongly-typed variables, and doesn't care about your indentation (and unfortunately there was no non-OOP language choice available - I'm not sure how this got in the curriculum when every teacher knows you only teach one concept at a time). As I said, many other teachers felt the same way, but couldn't get it past their school admin's.

[–] SmartmanApps 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)
[–] SmartmanApps 25 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (49 children)

I, as a teacher, have had to learn several languages, but that's not the dumb reason bit. The dumb reason bit was WHY I had to teach Python, which once I learnt it (so I cold teach it) I could see right away was NOT a suitable language for teaching to Year 7 (who up to now have only used Scratch). I was teaching the U.K. curriculum, and I found out that teaching C# was also allowed - still not ideal, but better than Python for learners -but pretty much all schools were teaching Python. When I dug into it I found I was far from alone in not wanting to use Python... and I also found out the reason schools were teaching Python. It was because from an ADMINISTRATIVE point of view it was much easier for the schools to have us teaching Python. In other words, the office-workers who didn't have to teach it, only had to admin it, were forcing everyone to teach Python because they wanted the lower overhead that came with installing/maintaining that vs. C#. ARGH! All the teachers who wanted to teach C# were running into exactly the same road-block.

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