Is the way we teach programming broken?

Going on past experience, and now current experience, Is the way that programming is taught broken/wrong.

On courses and in schools we are taught to program classes like Cat, Dog, Engine, Gearbox with no real reflection on the kind of programming that we do in the real world.  Also it is very rare that these classes make up a giant project as we go through, normally only used for a small exercise or two.

Should programming be taught with more of a focus on the real world and the kind of projects that happen in development houses (be that microsoft or your moms babsement web page maker).

You must learn to walk before you can run.

At Leiden University, we had basic programming, algorithms and data structures stuff, but we also had a software engineering course that had you do a semester-long project in a team of five people.

er... examples like that are only used in the first-year. By the time undergrads get into the second year they're already implementing medium-scale applications which would be impossible if they didn't know "programming".

Don't forget that most CS courses teach a specific language in the context of the course, other modules/courses would build on this knowledge to give students "real-world" (I hate that phrase...) problems to solve.

But yeah, trying learning a language (or even 'programming') from scratch with zero immediate application is going to make it much harder.

I think there is no reason both sides should not be taught.  The theory of good solid abstract OO design is a must, but should also be reflected in a real world scenario and why it’s good and works over just 'well this is the way you do it'.
 
I used to work as a Technical Architect in a FE College in the UK and the lecturers were so bad at teaching software development it was unbelievable.  They presented theory which was right out of a text book with no understanding themselves of what it was they were talking about and then got all students to build a boilerplate web site with a database back end and that was the course year after year.  In some cases the students were the teachers the year after they finished the course!
I am not saying it’s like that in all IT education in the UK, just this was my experience when working at once college.

Kind of depends if your teaching for Comp Sci or Software Engineering.

I think the problem is that most CS departments are filled with CS professors who have never worked in the "real world". They are experts in things like algorithm design, artificial intelligence, automata theory, but have no experience working on large-scale projects.

I learned a lot for my CS degree, and it has helped me pick up new languages very quickly. Where it has failed me is in design (to wjhich many of my recent threads can attest). We had a basic overview of MVC using Java and that was it. They offered a software engineering course, which I took, and while it exposed us to the various documentation steps (requirements, design, testing, etc.), there wasn't much focus put on the code itself. In retrospect, I should have looked for a college that offered a software engineering degree. I plan to go back some time and get a master's degree in S.E..

spivonious said:

I think the problem is that most CS departments are filled with CS professors who have never worked in the "real world". They are experts in things like algorithm design, artificial intelligence, automata theory, but have no experience working on large-scale projects.

 

I learned a lot for my CS degree, and it has helped me pick up new languages very quickly. Where it has failed me is in design (to wjhich many of my recent threads can attest). We had a basic overview of MVC using Java and that was it. They offered a software engineering course, which I took, and while it exposed us to the various documentation steps (requirements, design, testing, etc.), there wasn't much focus put on the code itself. In retrospect, I should have looked for a college that offered a software engineering degree. I plan to go back some time and get a master's degree in S.E..

Professors who have never left the academic world tend to be less interesting. I think teaching in general is hard either way. I think teaching in general needs a good hard look.

No. University education != job training.

Bass said:

No. University education != job training.

I agree that universities should be teaching more than just job training, but if they don't teach me software design, who will? I was turned down after an interview because I didn't demonstrates skills that the company felt should have been taught in a CS curriculum. These skills were all related to software design.

Some of my favorite classes in college had nothing to do with CS, such as Medieval History, Italian Renaissance art, and German.

spivonious said:

Bass said:

*snip*

I agree that universities should be teaching more than just job training, but if they don't teach me software design, who will? I was turned down after an interview because I didn't demonstrates skills that the company felt should have been taught in a CS curriculum. These skills were all related to software design.

 

Some of my favorite classes in college had nothing to do with CS, such as Medieval History, Italian Renaissance art, and German.

First, I think we need to distinguish that 'programming' is not the same as 'computer science'. Programming is a subset of computer science.

I am a programmer (or 'Software Engineer' if I'm feeling pretentious) but I am not a computer scientist.

Computer science should cover programming in the same way that it should cover micro processor design, concurrent systems and discrete mathematics. However because Computer Science is quite a broad subject, it cannot cover everything in depth so I don't expect computer science graduates to be able to sit down and write business software without a little more experience and training.

I think university courses need to name themselves more specifically than 'computer science' in the same way that other sciences don't just call their courses 'physics' or 'chemistry', but rather 'biochemistry' and 'nuclear physics'.

Herbie

spivonious said:

Bass said:

*snip*

I agree that universities should be teaching more than just job training, but if they don't teach me software design, who will? I was turned down after an interview because I didn't demonstrates skills that the company felt should have been taught in a CS curriculum. These skills were all related to software design.

 

Some of my favorite classes in college had nothing to do with CS, such as Medieval History, Italian Renaissance art, and German.

What kind of "software design" questions did they ask?

Dr Herbie said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

First, I think we need to distinguish that 'programming' is not the same as 'computer science'. Programming is a subset of computer science.

I am a programmer (or 'Software Engineer' if I'm feeling pretentious) but I am not a computer scientist.

Computer science should cover programming in the same way that it should cover micro processor design, concurrent systems and discrete mathematics. However because Computer Science is quite a broad subject, it cannot cover everything in depth so I don't expect computer science graduates to be able to sit down and write business software without a little more experience and training.

I think university courses need to name themselves more specifically than 'computer science' in the same way that other sciences don't just call their courses 'physics' or 'chemistry', but rather 'biochemistry' and 'nuclear physics'.

 

Herbie

If you were to ask me what kind of jobs a CS education should perpare you for, I'd say high algorithmic stuff. You are competent in robotics, computer vision, business intelligence (statistical algorithms), scientific computing, machine learning, bioinformatics. This is the kind of stuff that a background in mathematics is much more useful then knowing what "MVC" is. If you don't know what MVC is, no problem. But if you don't know what the "central limit theorem" is, your education has failed you.

Bass said:

spivonious said:

*snip*

What kind of "software design" questions did they ask?

What I now know are basic things, like UML diagrams, 3-tier architectures, setting up a basic data access layer, things like that. We briefly touched on UML diagrams in college, but didn't even mention the others.

spivonious said:

Bass said:

*snip*

What I now know are basic things, like UML diagrams, 3-tier architectures, setting up a basic data access layer, things like that. We briefly touched on UML diagrams in college, but didn't even mention the others.

None of those things are very difficult to learn on the job, and IMO wasting time with stuff like that even on an interview for a code monkey position is not that useful. Especially when you can be asking them data structures and algorithms questions.

Programming is like playing with LEGO. All they need to teach you is the parts. The rest is up to you how to build and connect the parts.

Bass said:

Dr Herbie said:

*snip*

If you were to ask me what kind of jobs a CS education should perpare you for, I'd say high algorithmic stuff. You are competent in robotics, computer vision, business intelligence (statistical algorithms), scientific computing, machine learning, bioinformatics. This is the kind of stuff that a background in mathematics is much more useful then knowing what "MVC" is. If you don't know what MVC is, no problem. But if you don't know what the "central limit theorem" is, your education has failed you.

I have to agree with you that an undergraduate CS curriculum should teach students broad subject areas and not narrow in on any particular methodology. I remember hearing that people in their 30s or 40s tend to become more adament and less willing to accept alternative perspectives on ideas. If this is the case, then younglings need sufficient exposure to these topics so that they can play around with many different ideas before they regress into suit and tie state.

At my school, CS covers mostly data structures/algorithms and computer systems. Java/C are taught, but only to support coursework. Not for "job training". In fact, they are going to swap out java as the introductory language with ML since they found students were struggling too much with java nuances, which prevented them from diving deeper into lecture.

And then we have Information Systems, which focuses more on design patterns (we learn MVC using RoR), unit testing, working on project teams (we have small real world client IS projects in our junior/senior years), creating ERDs and db schemas, code reuse, picking up new programming languages on the job, and documentation. It is essentially where the "software engineering" skills are taught.

Whether or not both curriculum should really be one remains a question to be answered.

As for the original question, "Should programming be taught to focus on real world projects?"...I think it depends. If the goal of the programming course is to enable you to better apply complex statistical models to answer a question, then the course should be very basic. If it's a high school intro programming course that aims to teach students what computer science is, then it should focus more on algorithms and in general how software is made. If it's a programming course part of a cs curriculum, it should focus more on the science and not the engineering aspects.

In general things are backwards.  You go to school, get a specialized degree, get a specialized job, and then move up in management to broader less specialized.

Why can't everyone start out with a MIS degree, get a management job, go to school for a specialized degree, and then move up to a programming job.

Think about.  Everything we do in life we constantly want to improve upon.  That naturally leads generalization into specialization.