Artagnon's Presence

This course attempts to teach programming methodology from an engineering viewpoint, as well give an insight into theoretical computer science.

Guidelines:

1. Teach programming, and not the programming language. Discuss abstract ideas in class, and ask students to write implementations in a language of their choice. Avoid building language-specific patterns (for example, the double-for loop for generating prime numbers in C got stuck in my head). Discuss various different implementations AFTER the students have tried it themselves.
2. Discussions should span several programming paradigms. Initially, cast problem statements to strongly indicate a paradigm. For example “Go over numbers from 1 to 10 and print those that are even” versus “Define an even number and print even numbers <= 10″. Later, let students figure it out themselves.
3. Develop a hacker mindset- give students incomplete solutions written by other students and ask them to complete it.
4. For routine assignments, prepare a huge problem set of ascending difficulty to randomly pick from, along the lines of Project Euler. Problems should cover algorithms, pure math, computational geometry, and dynamic programming.
5. Conduct collaborative programming sessions where students learn to implement from each other. No single instructor will be able to provide such a vast variety of implementations.
6. Prepare a reading list for software engineering, including articles on editing (introduction to specialized editors such as Vim and Emacs), debugging, versioning, testing, and profiling. It’s important to make students write large programs collaboratively in steps, so that they will be able to appreciate the importance of these tools.
7. Prepare another reading list for theoretical computer science. Also give students sneak peeks into the latest work in every field. The purpose of this exercise is to get students excited, so that they can work independently to eventually discover their research interests.
8. Finally, it all boils down to grading. If you’re going to ask students to evaluate things like (i++) + (++i) in the exam, it’s clear that you’re expecting students to know programming language intricacies, and not programming methodology.

lecture1.pdf (130 KB)