Timeline for What's the benefit of prohibiting the use of techniques/language constructs that have not been taught?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
7 events
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| Sep 16, 2019 at 22:05 | comment | added | Chris Stratton | What you are not understanding is that the point of being forced to solve the problem in a specific way at a given point in a course is to make sure you can really use that way. Then you move on and solve it in a different way. If the choice is always free, students merely stick with their preferred familiar way and never have to learn about the alternatives. There's also the distinct skill of learning to think in terms of the offered tools. The problem here is that you are trying to re-write the actual instructor's syllabus - when you aren't even a participant in the course(!) | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 20:55 | comment | added | csabinho | @ChrisStratton I'm talking mostly about beginners and restricting them to use anything that wasn't learned during the lessons stops them from being autodidacts, which is also an absolutely essential skill in programming life. Those restrictions often reach the point you are talking about: being only able to solve the problem in a specific way, and also, as mentioned above, it kills the drive to learn something new and teaches to stay on the given path and don't look to the left and right and don't strive to learn more and be ahead of what's taught, if you don't want to get punished! | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 20:36 | comment | added | Chris Stratton | @csabinho - it doesn't really matter what the restrictions are, it matters that dealing with restrictions is a fact of life in programming. Because you are not attending the course yourself, you may not be familiar with them as ground rules and so constantly trip over them while proposing things you consider ordinary. But the thought process of being able to work within any set of restrictions is key: never trust someone who can only solve a problem in a single way . Many areas within CS require drastic changes of thinking to adopt, and changing thinking is an important exercise. | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 18:06 | comment | added | allo | I am thinking of for example an restricted assembler dialect to teach how to work with its instructions. Or when you're thinking of foreach, maybe how to implement a loop using comparision and jump instructions. I do not know lectures, that really forbid foreach directly, but in the context of e.g. an didactic assembler dialect I see a point in for example not allowing a multiplication instruction, so the students need to implement it themself. | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 9:08 | comment | added | csabinho | And I am talking about language constructs like switch and foreach. Those are rarely taught in the schools which I have to deal with and would be really useful. | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 8:56 | comment | added | csabinho | I'm quite sure that you are talking about a completely different scenario than I am! I am talking about prohibiting everything that has not been taught, and of course on the other hand allowing everything that has been taught.You are talking about specific rules! Explicitly prohibiting certain things for certain tasks makes a lot of sense, of course! Prohibiting everything and always makes no sense at all! | |
| Sep 16, 2019 at 8:38 | history | answered | allo | CC BY-SA 4.0 |