{"id":319,"date":"2007-06-06T05:19:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-06T12:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=319"},"modified":"2007-07-29T12:54:01","modified_gmt":"2007-07-29T19:54:01","slug":"the-camel-has-two-humps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/?p=319","title":{"rendered":"The Camel Has Two Humps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just been reading an interesting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.mdx.ac.uk\/research\/PhDArea\/saeed\/paper1.pdf\">paper on teaching programming<\/a>. First, the data regarding rates of attrition on computing courses is startling. Between 30% and 60% of the total CS intake fails the very first programming course!<\/p>\n<p>The paper&#8217;s authors postulate 3 programming hurdles to be negotiated:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>sequencing and assignment<\/li>\n<li>iteration and recursion<\/li>\n<li>concurrency<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Surely one would think that the first of these is no hurdle at all (the concepts are part of everyone&#8217;s everyday life) and yet it is! From personal experience, I would say actually that recursion is quite a significant mental way past iteration, and I think many programmers never get that far, let alone to the hurdle of concurrency.<\/p>\n<p>They further posit 3 groups of pupils:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>those who accept and work with the system of rules that is ultimately meaningless<\/li>\n<li>those who attempt to see meaning where there is none<\/li>\n<li>those who refuse to work with meaningless rules<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Of these, only the first group succeeds as programmers. The other two flounder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just been reading an interesting paper on teaching programming. First, the data regarding rates of attrition on computing courses is startling. Between 30% and 60% of the total CS intake fails the very first programming course! The paper&#8217;s authors postulate 3 programming hurdles to be negotiated: sequencing and assignment&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elbeno.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}