[CS-FSLUG] College / University

[Frank Bax]

At 06:13 AM 12/12/06, Alan Trick wrote:
>My experience is that if you try to teach concepts without real, working
>example, the learner ends up taking quite a bit longer to figure things
>out and usually ends up understanding only part of what is going on.


There is another important aspect to this.  Most problems (that you want to 
solve with software) in the real world are presented in a manner that 
cannot be directly translated into to code.  The first step is always to 
translate the users request into something more clearly understood by 
*both* parties.  I remember one university calculus class was taught by an 
engineer (I was in math dept) with real-life problems in the tests.  I 
always had a big hurdle extracting the actual "problem" out of the question 
as written in the test.  Once that part was done, solving the equations was 
relatively easy.