U.S. Colleges Retooling Programming Classes

[Rich Tate]

Colleges across the country are now rethinking curriculums to boost interest as well as better prepare our students for the job market.

The course is aimed at reigniting interest in computer science among undergraduates. Educators at Georgia Tech and elsewhere are turning to innovative programs like the Scribbler to draw more students to the field and reverse the tide of those leaving it.

 

[Adisharr]

We've got to do something to keep the US on top if we're still there to begin with.

 

[MorfiusX]

The thing about most colleges now is that the CS majors they produce are usually not even close to being prepared for the real world. I have met so many people in the last couple of years who have a four-year degree and are working at a help desk. Maybe this will help...

 

[Elios]

CS has been so undermined but the likes of ITT and other "tech" schools
its the new Psyc

imo i think to take ANY kind of CS major you have to show you know something about it frist

not like these "tech" schools were they take people that dont even know how to use windows

i went to a a tech school once right after i got out of highschool it sucked i had to sit though a "this is how we use windows 95" class note this is back in 2000 but still
i quit the school after i tryed to correct the guy teaching the class becouse his book was out of date and wrong about a lot of stuff

but what im saying is they need to stop teaching to the lowest common denominator

 

[Martyr]

you mean they wont have to write and interest rate calculator or a cobination lock program again and again and again in different languages in each class? i swear if i iahve to write one more stupiud program like that there will be a fork in someones eye

 

[Manaknight]

CS has been so undermined but the likes of ITT and other "tech" schools
its the new Psyc

imo i think to take ANY kind of CS major you have to show you know something about it frist

not like these "tech" schools were they take people that dont even know how to use windows

i went to a a tech school once right after i got out of highschool it sucked i had to sit though a "this is how we use windows 95" class note this is back in 2000 but still
i quit the school after i tryed to correct the guy teaching the class becouse his book was out of date and wrong about a lot of stuff

but what im saying is they need to stop teaching to the lowest common denominator

i went to ITT and i have a better job than two of my friends who went to four year CS universities, one of them being CMU

just for the record

my four year degree was in history

 

[qkool]

For us, for our department, part is the problem is all the classes we have to take to meet the ACM requirements. Class difficulty range from 100 - 400 from freshman to senior respectively. While math majors can take say, biology 106, CS majors are required to take 155. That's just a drop in the bucket though.

For math majors to get a computer science minor, they just need 2 300 level CS courses and a few below that. On the other hand, for us to just meet the requirement for CS, we need to take 2 400 level math courses. Now these two courses are so hard that even the math majors complain about them. Basically with a CS major, we are getting 2 degrees at the same time, just w/o the extra required hours of 100 level courses. /rant

I've seen so many CS majors switch to CIS instead. It's not funny anymore. There's not enough CS graduates because many of them drop as soon as they start taking 300 level courses.

 

[movax]

I'm actually switching my majors up so I'll end up with CS Major in addition to EE and CE majors, instead of just making it a minor. I do a ton of CS work already at my job (co-op work term), so I figure it'll help anyways, and its an extra six months at most.

You can thank the media for pretty much fucking over the engineering and science fields. People I talk too, "ohh, better hope you don't get laid off from the automakers! Or your job doesn't get sent to India"!

Newsflash: NOT ALL ENGINEERS WORK IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY KTHX. AND ALL CS JOBS ARE NOT SENT TO INDIA.

 

[qkool]

As of right now, I'm taking all the hardware and software programming classes. I love those classes because our professor is like a real boss. He gives us an assignment and tells very little about what he wants, then when we're almost done, he changes the specification on us . But technically, if we did our assignment correctly, the changes shouldn't be a problem at all. I love his classes even though he can't teach. It's just work and more work, and if you don't understand A) ask him personally or B) learn from a book.

That robotics class sounds like something he'd teach. Maybe I could convince him to try this or something like this since he is the head of the department now. I'd love to take these types of classes even though I may not need them, instead of sitting in boring theory classes.

 

[CodeX]

As a senior in a CS program I have to say the curriculum is terrible. I have learned more about programming on my own than I have from any class I have taken. Unfortunately this is NOT the case most of my fellow students who know little to no practical knowledge of programming. I just finished my capstone project and after 25% of the class dropped, my group of 3 was the only group that anything resembling working software at the end to show for the 15 weeks we had to work on it. I am not even kidding when I say the other teams had NOTHING presentable, just theory and concept and a bunch of random code segments that might have done something if they had bothered (or where able to) tie them together in any meaningful way. My group rewrote an old programming game called AT-Robots, which was not our choice but the professors. By the end it was complete and functional, and we demonstrated several AI matches for part of our final presentation. Of the 3 people in the group I would say I did 75% of it...

Another thing, schools need to stop cramming Java down our throats. Java is a beautiful academic language but has little use, to this day, in the real world. I could care less about cross platform capability, you know why? Because Microsoft owns the market. It doesn't matter if you like it or not it is a fact. Linux and Java and the whole open source movement to me are the computer science equivalent of hippies, and the academic community is using college curriculum as a staging ground to try to advance their free code (read free love) ideals.

 

[qkool]

As a senior in a CS program I have to say the curriculum is terrible. I have learned more about programming on my own than I have from any class I have taken. Unfortunately this is NOT the case most of my fellow students who know little to no practical knowledge of programming. I just finished my capstone project and after 25% of the class dropped, my group of 3 was the only group that anything resembling working software at the end to show for the 15 weeks we had to work on it. I am not even kidding when I say the other teams had NOTHING presentable, just theory and concept and a bunch of random code segments that might have done something if they had bothered (or where able to) tie them together in any meaningful way. My group rewrote an old programming game called AT-Robots, which was not our choice but the professors. By the end it was complete and functional, and we demonstrated several AI matches for part of our final presentation. Of the 3 people in the group I would say I did 75% of it...

lol, sounds like me in my classes. I do almost everything, everyone else does enough and leeches. This goes the same with a friend of mine. He decided to do the database program in C# and everyone copied just because he was doing it in that language. Save for one other person in his class, everyone didn't know a thing about the language.

Another thing, schools need to stop cramming Java down our throats. Java is a beautiful academic language but has little use, to this day, in the real world. I could care less about cross platform capability, you know why? Because Microsoft owns the market. It doesn't matter if you like it or not it is a fact. Linux and Java and the whole open source movement to me are the computer science equivalent of hippies, and the academic community is using college curriculum as a staging ground to try to advance their free code (read free love) ideals.

I couldn't agree more. The only problem is that, if I remember correctly, Java is a requirement for ACM accredidation.

 

[flylite]

You guys sound really knowledgeable, especially from a practical standpoint. Can you give me some suggestions on how to begin learning computer programming? I'm an older electrical engineer that's been more focused on hardware, but I'd like to be able to develop firmware, device drivers, and eventually pc applications to make use of the hardware. I don't want to waste time going through a college curriculum when I can teach myself through books, online tutorials, or specific college courses.

So the question is, if you were the head of a department, what course and lab work would you outline for someone like to me? Feel free to mention specific class subjects, books, websites, robotic's/hardware starter kits, etc..

Thanks in advance.

 

[Joves]

I dont think the whole problem is only in the computer field, it is pandemic through the whole higher educational system. We have professors who dont even instruct their own students, many use TAs for all of their work. Some seem to see it below their station to actually teach. They keep using the same curiculum year after year. In stead of keeping up with changes. I see most universities raising their tuitions and, using that money to give raises to themselves or, building new structures, to leave their mark on the campus. Problem is too many of our educational systems are clogged with tenured people and, far too large administrations. That is where we lost alot of our edge.

 

[Martyr]

I dont think the whole problem is only in the computer field, it is pandemic through the whole higher educational system. We have professors who dont even instruct their own students, many use TAs for all of their work. Some seem to see it below their station to actually teach. They keep using the same curiculum year after year. In stead of keeping up with changes. I see most universities raising their tuitions and, using that money to give raises to themselves or, building new structures, to leave their mark on the campus. Problem is too many of our educational systems are clogged with tenured people and, far too large administrations. That is where we lost alot of our edge.

much like our businesses and government, huh?

 

[Martyr]

You guys sound really knowledgeable, especially from a practical standpoint. Can you give me some suggestions on how to begin learning computer programming? I'm an older electrical engineer that's been more focused on hardware, but I'd like to be able to develop firmware, device drivers, and eventually pc applications to make use of the hardware. I don't want to waste time going through a college curriculum when I can teach myself through books, online tutorials, or specific college courses.

So the question is, if you were the head of a department, what course and lab work would you outline for someone like to me? Feel free to mention specific class subjects, books, websites, robotic's/hardware starter kits, etc..

Thanks in advance.

well home do you know in hardware? device drives and firmware generally start right at the silicon and provide an interface for the os or other software to run on; having an understanding of what you want the hardware to do and how it works is a great start.

 

[osalcido]

good point on the java thing.

 

[DarkStar02]

I also agree with the Java thing. The only programming class that was available at my old high school was Java. I took the AP Java class, and I wasn't taught enough to write a program that could be deemed useful.

 

[/dev/null]

When you take CS courses, the language is the _least_ important thing to be considered, really! What you _should_ be taught in a good CS course is fundamentals OF languages themselves or how to write your own language.

 

[/dev/null]

When you take CS courses, the language is the _least_ important thing to be considered, really! What you _should_ be taught in a good CS course is fundamentals OF languages themselves or how to write your own language.

Oops forgot to mention: I'm in the financial industry and we use very little microsoft here for most of our backend trading servers. It is almost all Linux.

 

[acidic]

When you take CS courses, the language is the _least_ important thing to be considered, really! What you _should_ be taught in a good CS course is fundamentals OF languages themselves or how to write your own language.

I believe that is what most universities are doing. I know that at my university there is only 4 real programming classes that teaches you a language and the rest are on algorithms, analysis, theories, architecture, language designs, hardware/software interactions etc...

 

[qkool]

hmmm... we have (off the top of my head)

Intro to Programming (programming)
Object Oriented Programming (programming)
Data structures (programming)
Discrete Math
Theory of Computation
Algorithms (programming optional)
programming languages (some programming)
unix and internet programming (not much programming despite the name)
Computer Architect 1, 2
Databases (programming)
Operating Systems (programming)
... and a few others

We also have for electives special topics every semester and gaming 1/2 yearly (when there's enough people). Basically, you program your freshman year then very little afterwards until your senior year.

Like someone said above, it's just messed up that many of our CS majors can't program jack. They can't learn from books on their own, yet they're passing the classes because they can answer the questions correctly on the test. They can't compare which language to use and which language is best suited for the task at hand. They can only use what's been taught to them.

It's very disturbing to find that most of our seniors have absolutely no clue about consumer level routers, or they never heard of port forwarding. It's mind boggling really. It's pretty simple.

The one thing that almost made me say "wtf" out loud in the middle of class was when a senior had no clue about hostnames, IP addresses, and DNS servers. In short, he thought that he can just enter in any IP address and hook himself to the "internet" and it'd work. Which lead to us explaining to him about DNS servers and why they're their and why he couldn't simply do that.

Anyways, it's understandable that not everyone knows all about those stuff (hell I don't), and really it's not expected of them to do so. But after 5 years or so as a computer science major, somewhere, just somewhere he could've taken the liberty to read a book or a short article on how some of the stuff works.

Agree, disagree, hate me, like me, whatever, but I do think it's ACM's fault. I really do. Instead of forcing us to take courses like General Biology I and II (12 hours for a measly 8 credits), we could be using the 12 hours for classes like basic networking, advance networking, advance databases, graphics and design. Seriously, how many people here seen an Adtran before?

The field has grown so large that I don't have enough time to spend on non computer related classes.

 

[qkool]

I wish I could edit. That post had such bad grammer....