On 12/11/2013 3:43 AM, Chris Angelico wrote:
When you tell a story, it's important to engage the reader from the
start...explain "This is how to print Hello World to the
console" and worry about what exactly the console is (and how
redirection affects it)
Highly agree. I was once given FORTRAN course materials and an
assignment to teach this course. The first morning was spent on how to
construct expressions! No context as to what a program was or what it
might do or how to run it.
As soon as that class was over I rewrote the materials so the first
morning was how to write and run(batch job submission) a program that
read a record, did a simple calculation and wrote the results.
I certainly felt better about teaching this way.
Asides:
One student (PhD in Physics) looked at X = X + 1 and said "no it doesn't".
Another wrote his first program. I took one look at it and saw the
mistakes. I explained how to walk thru the program step by step. He
exclaimed "In that much detail?".
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