[Edu-sig] Re: explaining functions [Possibly OT]

[John M. Zelle]

Beni Cherniavsky said:

<snip>

>> By far the biggest difficulty I've seen students have is deciding how
>> and when to make their own functions. This is exacerbated by the fact
>> that in beginning programming you typically only write small programs
>> where writing your own functions might not be useful.
>>
> Writing only small programs is harmful.  Students must get the chance to
> write
> medium programs and to refactor them a lot.  I think that any attempt at
> teaching good style and structure by "here is how you should write" is
> futile.
>   Only by experiencing the hard way how is it to program without good
> structure will one learn its importance.
>

I agree with this basic assessment. However it is also true that students
won't necessarily just "stumble" on good ways of (re)organizing programs.
They probably need to see/write a couple programs in the "here is how you
should write" mold before the hard lessons of experience will be really
sucessful in internalizing this knowledge.

--John

-- 
John M. Zelle, Ph.D.
Professor of Computer Science
Wartburg College