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

[Chuck Allison]

Hello Jeffrey,

Friday, June 3, 2005, 7:08:29 AM, you wrote:

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

This is a major issue in software development. Much has been said
about "90-day wonders" during the dot-com boom, who learned a little
VB, enough to drag-and-drop their way into a "job". The ranks of these
people have a lot to do with the sad state of software quality (there
is a lot of research on this actually - it's called "The Battle of the
Exponents" - the number of VB coders exceeds our ability to train them
properly, and we're losing this battle). I think VB is the absolute
worst way to introduce programming, and emphasizing GUI in a first
exposure to computing is a mistake. Event-driven programming is a
narrow, over-emphasized slice of the software experience, and is
particular damaging to start a CS major off that way. I think there is
more than just a little deception in luring people into CS with a
visual approach, just to have them fail later on because they didn't
know what CS was really about. If you want to do that with IS majors,
go ahead, but not CS majors. It's just plain evil.

I think Python can fix a lot of this. I've actually been "concerned"
that if we switch to Python, they'll learn CS concepts too quickly,
and we'll run out of things to do in four years :-).

-- 
Best regards,
 Chuck