[Edu-sig] A case against GUIs in intro CS :-)

[Jeffrey Elkner]

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 01:59 -0700, Toby Donaldson wrote:
> When I taught VB (Visual BASIC), however, the GUIs were great, and
> students almost universally said the course was more interesting and
> enjoyable because of them. In part, they liked the fact that their
> programs looked like real programs, and that there was some room for
> creativity in how they organized their interfaces. Student were often
> driven to do extra programming by a desire to add or fix features they
> had seen in programs. I liked the fact that there was a very clear
> design phase where you had to sketch out the interface. Talking about
> the interfaces was a good way to talk about the program without
> talking about the source code. This helped students organize their
> source code, and to see first-hand the benefits of modularity, i.e.
> they were always writing the code for widgets in specially-named
> functions. Also, GUI widgets roughly correspond to programming
> concepts, when deciding if you want to use a text book or a list
> (say), you are indirectly deciding which data s!
>  tructure you want to use. Some students said they thought that
> learning VB first made it easier to understand Java-like OO GUI
> models.

Toby, check out pythoncard (http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/).  I have
a student this year, Daniel Caughran, who used it for his science fair
project, and he compares the experience favorably to using VB (with
which he is familiar).  He was able to put together a very useful GUI
program with a minimum of effort.  Version 1.0 will be out soon.  It
looks like teachers using Python can now offer their students the
advantages of VB without the disadvantages.

> As much as I like Python and dislike the BASIC part of VB, I do have
> to admit that my experiences with VB were probably the best I ever had
> teaching introductory programming (although it wasn't quite a CS1
> course, just a humble introduction to "event-driven" programming).

I "taught" VB for a year, and was amazed to find out that I made it
through the entire year without either myself or my students (naturally)
learning much of anything about programming.  To be fair, that is not
the fault of the tool itself (though the tool did contribute to the
problem), but rather the fault of the approach used to teaching it (it
was my fault, in other words, but let me explain ;-).

We used a Shelly Cashman book as the textbook for the course (I had
nothing to do with choosing it).  These books seem to be popular with
some folks inside the school system because they keep students busy (and
thus, the reasoning goes, out of trouble).  They also teach students
almost nothing.  Long, complex procedures are illustrated step-by-step,
with screen shots showing exactly what the screen should look like at
each stage.  Students are able to follow the instructions step-by-step
to achieve the desired result (thus they are kept busy), but the focus
is almost exclusively on the environment and the procedures are way to
complex for students to be able to extrapolate much of use from the
experience.

It is my hope that the grass roots nature of the Python community will
prevent this same kind of thing from happening with our teaching
materials, particularly as more and more people are using Python.  The
eclectic, cross platform, multi-environment nature of Python programming
will make it difficult for a Shelly Cashman type book to be written.  Or
at least we can hope...

-- 
Jeffrey Elkner <jeff at elkner.net>
Open Book Project <http://ibiblio.org/obp>