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by jldugger
1865 days ago
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> I picked up programming my freshman year and switched to CS from my original major. I was completely green while so many other students - what felt like a majority - had been programming for years There's been some research on this and places like Harvey Mudd solve this basically by dividing the incoming freshmen into 'has any experience at all programming' and 'completely new', which was like 50-50 if I recall. And then tweaking assignments to not be video game focused -- pulling in problems & themes from bioinformatics and other fields instead. |
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Our only program of any significance in CS101 was a space invaders clone, but because we were so inexperienced, they provided a project template where we really just had to fill in some methods with a bunch of for-loops. When we got to the later courses and had to write our programs from scratch, we really had no idea where to begin because the 101 coursework had done all of that for us.
The video game assignments were asinine because they were beyond our skill level to do from scratch, so their templates handled all the I/O for us and that part of the program was treated like a bunch of magical incantations. As a result, we never fully internalized how all the moving parts fit together, and it kept us from learning useful stuff like how to read/write from files or execute system commands.