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by tsumnia 2120 days ago
That is true and I recognize the purpose of being a proficient Googler; however my concerns stem out of the idea that learning many of those skills are not taught at all or expected to be learned in situ through programming assignments.

Here are examples of what I mean:

- An undergraduate Networking/Security course may not provide practice on appropriately salting passwords. It is merely discussed as part of some larger conceptual model. Students are browbeaten in earlier courses to not simply copy/paste code they find on the internet

- Debugging practice has to come from the student's own generated code, but if they made a mistake, they already are showing they do not fully grasp the material. There have been efforts to explicitly train debugging [1] but they are still in early stages of researching their benefits.

[1] The Code Mangler - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3017680.3017704

1 comments

Yeah there should be debugging classes, googling classes, and how to orient yourself in a massive, existing codebase classes.
I don't think they need to be explicit courses, since that means making credits and charging students more. Rather, my research is about providing exercises specifically targeting those lower level skills. Since many of them are only a fraction of the "programming problem", they are do not require the expected hours and can be completed quickly. My hypothesis is that doing these types of problems will help reduce the time on task for coding.