From: Matthew Smillie Date: 2006-06-12T18:10:37+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers? [much elided, since a lot of it seems like specific examples of the following general idea] >> ... So no, the point of a programming exercise is not simply for >> a student to produce the desired output, but rather to teach >> students something more fundamental about programming in a >> practical way. Philosophically, it's not just where you end up, >> it's how you get there. > > Absolutely. Do the students know this? (I'm being rhetorical). Sincere and serious answer: Not really. Most are willing to suspend their disbelief and take your word for it, given some reasonable explanations as to how it might benefit them. I wouldn't say that they really *know* it, certainly not at first, maybe not until they've had a hairy, real-world project to tangle with, and maybe not ever and they just think of it as having paid their dues once upon a time by proving that quicksort will always terminate. There's always a certain amount of "what's the point"-ism and "I'll never have to do this in the Real World", and the various academic urban legends[1] provide some interesting insight into how students often conceive of their studies and evaluation[2]. Getting around these perceptions, such as by inducing the above-mentioned suspension of disbelief, is a fairly large part of your job as an instructor. matthew smillie. [1] The 'barometer question' is probably the canonical example of academic urban legends: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp [2] In a lot of cases, though, they're entirely correct. I've had what I'd say is a more varied programming career than most (from web apps c. 1997, through mainframes and telecoms switches, to graduate school in natural language processing) and there are plenty of things from my undergrad degree that I've never had to worry about again. The catch, though, is that as an undergrad neither I nor my instructors could ever have predicted exactly what has ended up being the most useful: I really liked the graphics course, but I've never touched it since, and the frustratingly hard course on graph theory has been enormously helpful.