I just heard a prominent computer science educator say that the reason for the decrease in the numbers of CS students is that computer science is boring. His solution? Make it easier.
Well, if computer science is boring, it is because it's been trivialized and banalized beyond recognition. 'Making it easy' usually means ignoring the hard parts -- but alas, those parts are, at the same time, the most intriguing ones!
So, it might indeed be true that computer science has been made boring. My solution: give CS back its intellectual buzz by bringing back challenge to computing.
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5 comments:
YES you are right, CHALLENGE is KEY!!!!!
In this post it calls my attention, which meaning has the term "boring" for this person. Lack of fun? Lack of intrinsic motivation? and what for s/he is fun? or not boring?
Make things "easy", in most of the cases, is not the solution to engage individuals to do anything. The real balance between challenge with the person's skills on a specific task engage anyone to reach a specific goal.
As a bad student as I am, but avid of learning, I wonder myself, how many teachers (from any discipline) are in "flow" in their own teaching? What are they transmitting to their students, it is a boring topic or it is something worth to keep on knowing more about and with that defying the young audience to get into by themselves.
From the student side, poor young souls (including me at its time) we are lost. Few kids at the age of 18 know what they want to be when they get old. Many people study a degree, specially when the are just fresh meat form high school, just because that might assure them to have a job, hopefully a better one. But which kind of job they want, no one knows. How can someone engage passionaly on something if that person has no clue what it is, or what do does s/he want out of it?
When do you get hook with something? (that is the question) Usually when the challenge is the right one with your skill level. Additionally that challenge to conquer, you know it is not something trivial to do. :) After you had succeed on that task, it gives pleasure. Later you want to conquer more.
Just as the previous commenter, I don't quite understand that gentleman. Granted, English is not my mother tongue - but I understand "boring" as "dull", "uninteresting", but most of all "offering no challenge". Making a boring thing easier gives you ... an easy, but still (and perhaps more) boring thing?
But about CS being boring... OK, definitions of CS may vary, but in terms of general IT (and also its reflections to academia), times are IMHO much more interesting than they were, say 10-15 years ago. Back then, CS facilities really tended to produce glassy-eyed. one-dimensional Microdroids (on the excuse that "industry needs them"), nowadays things are at least quite a bit varying.
Just my two cents... :)
Perhaps if everyone studying computer science had to do it in Tanzania that would draw some interest?
You haven't posted in a while, so according to the title of your blog that must be good news. But I would be quite surprised if there aren't a ton of interesting things you could say about your new position at Tumaini.
Also, I'm trying to keep your office interesting, as I am using your desk for the moment, but I think it is difficult to compare to when you and Jussi where here. Jussi did leave me a can of baked beans, however, which was very thoughtful - and I keep your notes still posted on the boards.
Nice that you like the office -- we made the artistic note composition on the wall just for you! Save Jussi's can-o-beans for an emergency situation (e.g. an all-nighter due to a paper deadline).
The reason I'm not writing here about Tanzania is that I'm busy writing another blog, which I consider to be an ethnographer's diary (ha ha). The reason keeping that blog private is that it contains notes and observations about my colleagues.
This is definitely the case at my school. The programming classes are so dumbed-down you wouldn't believe it.
If it weren't for me having the interest on my own to pursue more than what's taught in class, and the shelf full of programming books I've purchased, I wouldn't know anything.
There are literally recent graduates from my program (a program comprised mostly of Programming majors who hate to write code, if that makes any sense) who would be hard-pressed to write anything beyond a "Hello World" in Java without looking in the book.
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