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You are correct that the Project Euler approach isn't well suited for learning to program, although I would qualify it with "for some", if not most - especially the less mathematically inclined, or those who care more about things like social or real-world problems. You have to show programming and computer science as being more than just solving artificial puzzles or doing math & logic for its own sake. It should be noted that this site and others have been around for 10 years, and in the meantime the number of people majoring in computer science has actually dropped (I think it finally turned upward this year though), and the proportion of female and minority students in computer science has actually dropped. Notice too how the author of this article, the author of the project euler site, and, from what I can tell, everyone here is a guy. Every article I read about 'why johnny can't program' and so forth are by guys, usually older folks who already understand the relevance of programming, but perhaps can't understand how it might not be so evident to others. I know it took me a long time (almost ten years) to see it. When I was first introduced to programming, to draw an American flag on the screen in BASIC, it was boring and pointless compared to the colecovision next to it :) It wasn't until I created a CGI perl app for letter-writing with our amnesty international group and also a hypercard program for an HCI class that I dived in. Teaching programming or computer science 'for its own sake' is not going to help most see the relevance of it to their lives and to the world. Show how you can accomplish things with programming, how you can help people, and so forth. Like someone else pointed out, the rosettacode site is similar, but at least it gives some more practical problems. Also, there's the fact that computer science is not required in most schools, and thus, like engineering, most don't ever think to major in it or work in the field. |