You're not going to turn shlubs into Einsteins by forcing students' heads under water next to a calculus textbook.
I've suffered at the hands of "CS is all math" profs. I was in a course that subjected a bunch of CS-101 students to this kind of thing. A whole semester of "Here's a proof that this ten line program sums some numbers correctly."
A collective "Huh?" from the class.
It became crystal clear, after nearly everyone failed the mid-term, that things were not working. The profs held a "come to Jesus" class, where they explained everything; all the proofs, all the ten line programs that added or multiplied numbers, all the assignments full of greek symbols they made us learn. That all became crystal clear, and you could see the lightbulb blink on, just above everyone's head:
/Yup, they're trying to fuck us./
[I survived this course because I wrote my own functional language interpreter, then just typed their damned calculus into it for the programming assignments. What a crock.]
I take a real dim view of teaching "mathematically pure" CS to beginning students. You don't start riding a motorcycle by doing experiments with gryroscopes in a lab; you listen to an instructor, get on the damned thing and learn to ride in a safe environment. Save mathematical purity for after you get 'em hooked.
I've heard: "Oh, but if have them program in BASIC we're doing irreperable harm!"
Horsepucky. I'd rather have an ex-BASIC hacker at my side, helping me ship, than someone who can't write a hundred line program without dragging in declarations that nobody will be able to understand a week later. The best engineers I know weren't hurt by exposure to BASIC, or assembly; they were good at everything.
I guess I'm just a greasemonkey with a keyboard.
[I love Scheme, btw. I don't get functional languages that think it's okay to ditch the programs-as-data paradigm.]
I've suffered at the hands of "CS is all math" profs. I was in a course that subjected a bunch of CS-101 students to this kind of thing. A whole semester of "Here's a proof that this ten line program sums some numbers correctly."
A collective "Huh?" from the class.
It became crystal clear, after nearly everyone failed the mid-term, that things were not working. The profs held a "come to Jesus" class, where they explained everything; all the proofs, all the ten line programs that added or multiplied numbers, all the assignments full of greek symbols they made us learn. That all became crystal clear, and you could see the lightbulb blink on, just above everyone's head:
/Yup, they're trying to fuck us./
[I survived this course because I wrote my own functional language interpreter, then just typed their damned calculus into it for the programming assignments. What a crock.]
I take a real dim view of teaching "mathematically pure" CS to beginning students. You don't start riding a motorcycle by doing experiments with gryroscopes in a lab; you listen to an instructor, get on the damned thing and learn to ride in a safe environment. Save mathematical purity for after you get 'em hooked.
I've heard: "Oh, but if have them program in BASIC we're doing irreperable harm!"
Horsepucky. I'd rather have an ex-BASIC hacker at my side, helping me ship, than someone who can't write a hundred line program without dragging in declarations that nobody will be able to understand a week later. The best engineers I know weren't hurt by exposure to BASIC, or assembly; they were good at everything.
I guess I'm just a greasemonkey with a keyboard.
[I love Scheme, btw. I don't get functional languages that think it's okay to ditch the programs-as-data paradigm.]