Alex Rivera | Logout

How to keep a programming course interesting?

Asked 2008-12-07T19:59:43.387
9

I guess, the following is a standard problem on every school or university:

It is Your job to teach programming. Unfortunately, some of the students are semi-professionals and have years of experience while others do not even know the basic concepts, e.g. the concept "typed variable".

As far as I know, this leads to one of the following situations:

  1. Programming is tought from its very basics. The experienced students get bored and discontinue to visit the lectures. As a consequence, they will miss even the stuff they do not already know.
  2. Teachers and professors claim that they require basic knowledge (whatever that means). Inexperienced students cannot follow the lectures and a lot of them will focus on unimportant stuff (e.g. understanding every detail of a complex example while not getting the concept behind the example). Some of them will give up.
  3. Universities invent an artificial programming language to give experienced programmers and newbies "equal chances". Most students will get frustrated about the "useless language".

Is there a fourth solution, which is better than those above?

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13

IMO this is a problem based on the placement of the students, not something you should be too interested in dealing with on your end as a teacher.

If the course is an introduction to programming a computer, then you really need to start with the basics. If you have a classroom full of professionals who know how to program and they don't show, it was either a problem with your course description, or the school forcing them to take the class as a pre-req without allowing them to test out.

Your job should be to describe what you want to teach in the course description, and teach it. If students enroll who are overqualified, that's their problem. I think the only thing you really need to avoid is trying to make the course too advanced for beginners if your course really is for beginners.

answered 2008-12-07T20:06:59.190

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