[geeks] geeks Digest, Vol 86, Issue 11

[der Mouse]

> Unfortunately most "computer lessons" in schools don't teach
> concepts.

Not surprising.  The majority of people don't seem to think that way
very well.

> They do not teach how to abstract from the detail to the general and
> how to deduce from the general to the detail.

No.  That's what the majority I mentioned above doesn't do well.
They're much better at matching new situations against things they've
seen before and doing what worked last time.  (This can be a very
effective technique when used by someone who's really good at
cross-indexing all the relevant aspects of an experience, especially in
fields where underlying patterns are fuzzy at best.  Computers are one
of the fields where it fails worst.)

This reminds me of the time I taught operating systems.  One year, I
taught operating systems (the engineering version, not the computer
science version).  I went to some lengths to make it a "teach the
underlying concepts and make sure people can think with them" course.
For exmaple, the exams were open-everything (notes, books, cheat-sheet,
basically any paper you could carry into the exam room was OK), because
they were not about memorizing and reciting facts but about concepts
and applying them.  (For example, one question gave a pageful of
semaphore-based synchronization code with bugs and asked the students
to fix the bugs.  Since I made up the code when I created the exam, it
wasn't something you could find in a reference; to get that question
you had to understand concurrency....)

The really interesting thing was students' reactions.  It was a
severely bimodal distribution: there was one large clump of people over
at "this is strange and different, give me the other way back" and
another at "this is strange and different, give me more", with
practically nobody anywhere in between.  (The class was mostly
undergrads in the last year before graduating of a computer or EE
program, so there had already been a good deal of selection pressure
against people who hadn't found _some_ way to handle computers.)

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