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by noelwelsh
4792 days ago
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The market for teaching Computer Science fundamentals is already rather crowded with thousands of Universities competing in that space. It's no surprise that Codeschool et al don't address that market. At their pricing level they are going for volume and volume is obviously at the lower end of the market. Now there are to me two interesting points: 1. Is there a market for a more advanced CS education delivered outside the University system? Coursera/Udacity/EdX cover this to some extent, but even here their courses are simplified versions of the University offering. 2. Is there a way to do address the volume market in a significantly better way than Codeschool et all do? Their pedagogy is quite out-dated -- it's the old programming language as bag of syntax approach. The How to Design Programs (http://htdp.org/) approach, which I'm familiar with, is much better. I'm sure there are other initiatives. |
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Funny enough, we go over basic data structures (linked lists, stacks, queues, etc.) in the first week at DBC and we emphasize at every level of the curriculum that being a good programmer means being able to translate some idea you have in your head into code. We teach mainly Ruby and JavaScript, but the students know it's incidental.
I just helped four students today finish their first-week project, which is a Sudoky solver. When they see the solver I wrote solve 500 puzzles in 5 seconds they want to know how. That's the perfect time to teach them about algorithms and data structures.