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

[Arthur]

> Behalf Of Radenski, Atanas
> > Behalf Of Bob Noonan
> 


> GUI programming is relatively complex. To understand it, one needs to
> understand event handling. I have hard time explaining event handling to
> beginners and see that beginners have hard time understanding it. While
> GUI programming is complex from beginner's perspective, it does not
> offer many interesting algorithmic problems.

Right.  After hearing people discussing closures and not closures for some
time, and not needing to understand the concept, and therefore not
understanding the concept, I ran into a concrete GUI problem (in tkinter as
it happens) and a little googling helped me find some information posted up
by Scott David Daniels that addressed my concrete problem and did so via an
implementation and explanation of the closure concept.
 
> I believe that we humans are really good at linear communication. Most
> animals see and understand pictures. We humans have the exclusive
> capability of speaking and hearing *linear sequences* of sounds, while
> animals are not particularly good at that. We are also good in reading
> and writing sequences of characters while no known animals can do that.

A bit OT perhaps but I do wish pedagogical approaches had more respect and
insight into our non-linear nature, especially when it comes to the learning
process.  I just don't remember any coursework where we said, "now having
gotten through Chapter 8, we are going to circle back around to Chapter 3
and 4 again and redo it, and we will get things from it - with Chapters 5-8
under our belt - that we undoubtedly missed the first time around.  Left to
my own resources, this is exactly how I approach and successfully learn
subjects like math and programming - absolutely consistently.

Kirby mentions the Guido tutorial in a recent post.

Its not like I worked it once and left it behind.  I did a once over
lightly, and then probably iterated over at least portions of it 7 or 8
different times, at different points of my early process, each time getting
different things from it. I'm sure if I did it today, I would still learn
something new from it.

The Internet, with Google and the like, is a great non-linear resource. The
beauty of it being that nobody really designed it as such.  It sort of
happened.

Left untouched it is a great learning environment. When we intercede to
create a more ordered learning environment, it seems to me that we are
always tending to linearize it somehow, and therefore reducing it from what
it already is.

What we need to do to turn the Internet into a learning environment is
pretty much nothing.  Activists (and business folk) seemed to have a problem
with that approach.

I am only a modified Luddite.

Art