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From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,comp.software-eng
Subject: High school vs university CS (Re: Re^2: CS education)
Message-ID: <5810@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: 30 Nov 89 02:58:11 GMT
References: <1989Nov21.172751.3078@world.std.com> <7183@hubcap.clemson.edu> <452@cherry5.UUCP>
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Reply-To: manis@faculty.cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis)
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In article <452@cherry5.UUCP> murphyn@cell.mot.COM (Neal P. Murphy) writes:
>Computers are tools, and learning to use tools is something one usually
>does in junior high and high school. Shift this facet of education to our
>primary and secondary school systems. Help the people running those systems
>to develop at least and adequate curriculum. Teach the educators what they
>need to know so that they can teach their students about these tools.

Absolutely. Neal has brought up an issue I feel very strongly about. 

For far too long, CS has been considered to be a service discipline,
much like Statistics or (sadly) Mathematics. Students did not take
Computer Science because they thought it was a good discipline to study,
but because somebody thought it would be good for them to learn to
program in Fortran. Students kept at CS because if they wanted to be
Cobol programmers, they needed a CS degree. 

This is all changing. University-level CS is now very much a scientific
discipline, as much as Chemistry and Physics, and it is just as
reasonable for us to expect that students know how to manipulate the
basic tools before they start our courses as it is for chemists and
physicists (Rocks, Shocks, and Potions, indeed!). 

What I expect of a student who wants to study computer science is not so
much any CS background (though it is very useful if s/he knows how to
turn the power on and off, and some word processor experience is
helpful) as good basic math and English. In return, I don't claim to
teach that student how to be an effective user of computers, but rather
to understand the principles of CS as a field. 

As for high school CS courses, they're fine: the sort of standard
AP-style Pascal course won't really harm the student, and it will at
least give him/her some sort of basic idea about how computers work.  In
the absence of some really heavy-duty in- and pre-service courses on the
principles of computer science, and how to teach computer science, I
think that this is about the best one can hope for.
--
Vincent Manis <manis@cs.ubc.ca>      "There is no law that vulgarity and
Department of Computer Science      literary excellence cannot coexist."
University of British Columbia                        -- A. Trevor Hodge
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1W5 (604) 228-2394


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