So, to make student interested in CS and programming is. don’t make it looks difficult and serious lesson

However there is also another ingredient. Internal motivation. Everybody has their own motivation for taking up a course in CS (computer science), SE (software engineering) or CSSE. I’m doing a CSSE course, kinda like a mutated version of a plain vanilla CS course

Anyway, my motivation comes from my interest in building stuff. I want to create something that people can interact with, something that humans can use. Sure, the process of getting to the final product is very interesting too, but I love just _creating_ shit.

Other people don’t care about the final product. They care purely about the challenge of programming. It’s not a means to and end. They are interested in the logic, the math, and the dark esoteric corners of programming languages.

I think people should understand what their motivation is. Motivation is diverse – you don’t have to be a math freak to love CS . But if you figure out they don’t have one, then it’s probably not a good idea to be studying CS, SE or CSSE

When I was in the 12th Grade computers class the teacher was reading a book on Pascal out loud to us. Pascal ! I got the feeling that was about as large a conceptual leap as he could manage from FORTRAN. He didn’t even bother to read ahead the day before and hence he frequently mis-understood concepts in the book and explained completely the wrong thing to us. He was actually a Maths teacher who had been thrust into computing because he had the least charisma and self-confidence of the Maths department.

If you wanted to learn, you’d have been better off doing it on your own.

We had another computers teacher who was also a Maths teacher but who actually loved computers. Unfortunately, he was better with the younger kids and didn’t teach 10th, 11th or 12th Grade.

When I got to University, my Dad gave me his PDP-11 handbook and all his old punch-cards. (Then they taught me Java… Oh well.)

I moved to a new city about 2 years ago, in february, and went to a school to play football of all things, signed up for a class whose name i didnt understand. And next thing I know I’m in the almost exact same situation. People trying to hard simply to go straight to game making. We had an assignment to make a mini story game (was supposed to be a few decisions with consequences and could all be in text), most people tried too hard and wound up with low low marks by trying to figure out the sprite module ( we used turing), while me and the two others in the class who actually came because we were interested made text based ones, and mine scored 98 and you could actually equip fight run, and a few other things(I’m not going to mention the pain it was to make this without knowing arrays yet…). Sure it was all text but it was fun to most, and *key point* it ran. Out of 26 students, only 8 of the programs ran, and 4 of them almost always crashed halfway through.

Enough bragging about me though, My teacher was better than this article states, knows vb and turing decently well enough to help you, and could understand what i was doing when i started copying from you guys. Now I learn on my own, and am heading bacxk to another class(now gr 12) in jan., Learning vb, I cannot wait to see what happens this time XD

Motivation was not an issue once I started, I’ve always liked computers, and figuring out what makes them run is one more thing I can learn.

I’ve finished my first year of Computer Programmer at St. Clair College, and I must say I was disappointed in the programming classes. They taught VB.NET, and it was agonizingly slow. I had already had much experience with programming, though no VB. I bought the textbook about 1 week before classes started and read a bit of it. These half dozen chapters were taught in the first 2 months. It was slow. No real theory concepts were introduced, and we were taught more of how to use VB rather than program. Not to mention, my second sememster teach Mrs. Dupuis had experience programming in the career-world, however had no knowledge of any standard practices and was hung up on VB6. It was common for me to point out something to her in class and her be “Oh, my, that’s new!”. And it was within the first 2 chapters of the text book. Another example is how we used OLD controls. We had to add the old controls to the toolbox (MainMenu comes to mind, rather than the MenuStrip that was already there).

Well, that was half rant. Anyways, my point being that a student will have to delve beyond the classroom in order to succeed. My grade 10-12 computer teacher taught me my first programming using Turing, and I’ve learned on my own since. Of course, I’ve wanted to program since before grade 8, so motivation was not an issue for me.

I think that you have identified some of the key issues in high school CS education. We have some ideas about how to fix this, and it involves robots. Take a look at out stuff at http://myro.roboteducation.org/ and give us some feedback.

Thanks again!