Re:Ask HN: “Year zero” for CS students? Use a terminal, etc
by qppo on Friday April 24, 2020 @09:30PM
(#22974792)
My experience has been that the hard part is not teaching students using tools effectively, but getting professors/academics to learn that the tools exist.
Re:Ask HN: “Year zero” for CS students? Use a terminal, etc
by vincent-manis on Saturday April 25, 2020 @09:59AM
(#22978144)
Very true!
I recall the student who had spent (by his account) half a day trying to find a bug in his program. When he enlisted my help, I pulled up a debugger (which he was supposed to have learned, according to the syllabus) and found the bug in moments.
Or the software engineering project groups in my SE courses. They were all supposed to be using source code control. The ones who actually used it all reported that it helped immensely. The others produced uniformly poorer work.
Learning how to use tools effectively helps a student to do better lab work, and therefore reinforces the theoretical principles we are trying to teach.