Beginner Tutorials

[Rick Johnson]

On Friday, January 18, 2013 11:04:39 AM UTC-6, Rik wrote:
> The reason for disabling right-click has nothing to do
> with protecting content, and everything to do with
> stopping my students from taking the lazy way out.
> 
> Given the chance, they'll copy/paste the code and download
> the designs and edit them slightly. They'd get through the
> tutorials in about 25 minutes and have learnt next to
> nothing.
>
> In talking to students about existing resources, they said
> that blindly copying code didn't really help them get a
> deep understanding of algorithms and how to apply them to
> other problems.

Well anyone who is just blindly copying code to get through a CS course is obviously not a "natural" problem solver ,and thus, /incapable/ of becoming a proficient programmer anyhow. Programming *IS* problem solving. If you don't get any thrill from the hunt, you might as well go home and watch Monty python until your eyes bleed or the next welfare check arrives.

But don't paint with too wide a brush on the copy-paste subject matter either because i have /no/ hesitation to copy paste when the code is mostly boilerplate required by some asinine interface, like oh I dunno, WINDOWS GUI PROGRAMMING!!! ಠ_ಠ. I am not about to invest one second /learning/ much less trying to /comprehend/ why someone would create and release such a gawd awful monstrosity.

Natural problem solvers always love a challenge and they always like to peek under the hood and see what makes this or that "tick". You need no more than to present these people with a problem and they *WILL* discover the answer (given enough time of course). 

  "The only limit to an individuals imagination is his lifespan" --rr