Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
I disagree here. It's an increasing complaint people are having about IT education that students do not know how to program. I cannot see why they should. I myself am I programmer and it's a specific skill and actually one that I don't have to call upon for everyday life, I can't recall a single time I have needed to write some code to achieve a non-work related task. What's more it's a skill that easily atrophies without regular use, frameworks, languages and libraries I haven't used for years are forgotten. You also have to remember that a large part of modern programming concerns it's self with abstract notions to make it easier such as variables, methods, objects, inheritance and more all of which are fundamentally useless if applied elsewhere.
We also have little time to teach students. They have to be educated in so many other things that their education within IT should not be spent on a specific and narrow skill but a broader understanding of the basics of computing, the internet and so on.
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I agree that we can't expect schools to teach everything about computing, or even teach the low level stuff. They don't have time. However, I am not necessarily talking about that. I'm talking about encouraging students to do things like scripting if they want, but I see a lot of students who are actually brilliant with Office and Windows (from a GUI point of view) but ask them about a file or folder and they'll look at you as if you are speaking Swahili.
You can argue that if someone is interested enough to program, they will and there are plenty of free tools to help them, and, in general, you'd be right, assuming they are interested enough to look in the first place. What about those who don't know they are interested? Maybe some would be with a little encouragement.