Newsgroups: comp.edu Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!van-bc!ubc-cs!manis From: manis@cs.ubc.ca (Vincent Manis) Subject: Re: secondary education computer mastery Message-ID: <1991Apr10.164652.1726@cs.ubc.ca> Sender: usenet@cs.ubc.ca (Usenet News) Organization: Institute for Pure and Applied Eschatology References: Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 16:46:52 GMT In article freewill@nstar.rn.com (Bill Williston) writes: > 1. What computer skills are required for freshman CS majors? I'm posting, rather than replying, because I want to raise some issues which go beyond Bill's question. 1) I heartily disapprove of the concept of `first-year [anything] majors'. I'm constantly amazed at the number of students who arrive at our university with a detailed educational plan, only to change it completely after a year or so. Accordingly, secondary schools ought to concentrate upon giving a student breadth, so that s/he knows enough about the various fields of human endeavour to be able to choose electives (and even a minor) intelligently. 2) Many of our students lack study skills. Many are even non-readers. (They're not illiterates; they can read perfectly well, but choose not to. This is not a serious disability in the `real world:' back when Reagan was President, an article in the NY Times pointed to the number of non-readers who had become heads of government in their countries.) If I could point to the subjects which I think best prepare students to do CS, I would choose mathematics and English. English is important not just because CS students need to be able to read and write, but also because the analytical and synthetic skills needed to be able to write an essay turn out to be analogous (not identical!) to those needed for programming and problem-solving proficiency. 3) As for specific skills, I'd tend to say that programming skills aren't really that interesting to us (we don't have labs full of PC's, so whether a student can make Turbo Pascal do weird things is, er, academic). General computer skills are certainly useful: knowing how to operate a word processor proficiently is certainly a strong advantage at the beginning. Problem-solving skills are also useful: the kind of analysis needed to set up a data base is similar to that needed to solve a programming problem. Back to my original point: good as it is to know what sort of computer skills a university might expect of incoming students, it's even better to know, I think, that what universities really need are students who are intellectually prepared for academic work. -- \ Vincent Manis "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