[PLUG-TALK] What they teach in CS classes

John Sechrest sechrest at jas.peak.org
Tue Dec 6 16:45:41 UTC 2005



At OSU, I taught a system admin class which follows the first
Operating systems course. The person is demonstrating the same
process that I have seen in other students here. A desire to be
told the answer. When in trouble ask someone, don't research.

IE, first they are looking for answers and secondly they expect
to be told the answer. That research consists of asking your friends
or asking an expert. 

Often they get in a desperate space and start flailing. This is not
a Junior college behavior. I see it regularly. And hopefully we have
trained them out of it by the time that they graduate. 

when you try to educate all of the people, you get a wide range
of behaviors as a result. Not everyone is ready to do research 
when they hit college.

In addition, I assign homeworks which are an exploration homework.
Go learn the basics about this. Come back with experiences and
look at what you have found. The goal is not to make them good
at scripting, but to make them good at looking on the net for 
resources that help. And to get them to work in teams to build
models. 

We try to disect the results in class so that people can amplify what
they do.


How do you teach people to learn on thier own about a topic. 
IE, given no recipe, and just a problem, how to solve that problem
by doing research? 

You can't do it by giving them a recipe. And so you have to give
them problems that they don't know how to solve and work with them
to find pathways to solve it. 

Writing a shell script is a small exploration in that space. 
So given the little I have seen of the conversation, it seems
like a reasonable assignment. 

It is likely someone trying to break the MS java only mindset of the 
students. 


--johns




Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com> writes:

 % On Tue, 6 Dec 2005, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
 % 
 % >  Ok, am computer science major and all my programming class have dealt with
 % >  java, but I have been given the assignment of writing a shell script in
 % >  Linux. We haven't talked about Linux, grep, or shell scrips in class so
 % >  this is a " do some research, try it and see what you get" kind of thing.
 % 
 % >  Did you read the very first post I made on this??  If not,you can find it
 % >  in the archives. I am taking a class on Operating systems, we don't talk
 % >  about Linux and how to do shell scripts in class and I have no books on
 % >  Linux. This email list will be part of my list of recourses along with the
 % >  numerous web sites I have visited.
 % 
 % Mike,
 % 
 %    Nothing about this makes sense to me. And, the only CS course I had
 % was FORTRAN 401 in 1973 when I was a grad student and had to take the course
 % after using the language (learned on my own) to write models for a year.
 % 
 %    Why would any instructor in an OS course give an assignment to write a
 % linux shell script without an introduction to linux and shell scripting? It
 % used to be that OS courses used Minix; are they all Microsoft-centric now?
 % 
 % > I still feel like the writer is BSing everyone.
 % 
 %    I agree. It also does not bode well for society if this is the limit of
 % knowledge for some CS grads. Perhaps he's at a junior college?
 % 
 % Rich
 % 
 % -- 
 % Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
 % Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
 % <http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863
 % _______________________________________________
 % PLUG-talk mailing list
 % PLUG-talk at lists.pdxlinux.org
 % http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-talk

-----
John Sechrest          .         Helping people use
                        .           computers and the Internet
                          .            more effectively
                             .                      
                                 .       Internet: sechrest at peak.org
                                      .   
                                              . http://www.peak.org/~sechrest



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