[theyak]

It is completely unclear from this rant what the daughter knew before entering the class. I don't care if she had used Linux, that doesn't mean she knew jack squat about programming.

I taught an intro to computer programming course at a local community college for a semester. The curriculum was set, so I couldn't really venture off to my own thing. What I learned is that what we have to teach simply is boring. Sorry, but you have to learn about loops, conditionals, variables, and all those other mundane things before you can move on to more interesting things. And let's get real, how interesting are things ever going to be in a class? Not very. It gets exciting when you know enough to create a project on your own. An intro to computer course is not that course - I wish it were.