Guro

Fellow Java Champion, Cay Horstmann, Computer Science Professor at San Jose State University in California, is featured at the Sun Developer Network. One of the questions he answered was “What advice do you have for beginners?”, and he answered:

First, don’t panic. When students first see the API with thousands of classes, they despair. I used to be able to tell them, “That’s OK, at least the language itself is very simple.”

I agree with him that students tend to get overwhelmed when they first see the API documentation. However, it is our job to make sure that we reassure them that learning Java is not that difficult.

And then he cites

Last summer at a faculty summit at Google, bigwig professors from big-name universities expounded on their efforts to reform the computer science curriculum and make it less focused on programming. The organizers from Google said, “That’s all fine and good, as long as the students can code when they graduate.”

Unfortunately, there are *still* colleges and universities in the Philippines that shy away from this. They do teach programming but only to comply with the gov’t requirements. Sad, but true. Anyway, this is where JEDI comes in.

Then Dr. Horstmann was asked, “What are the biggest mistakes that your fellow teachers of Java programming make?”, which he answered:

They lecture too much. I think it’s horribly ineffective to lecture for 50 or even 75 minutes without giving the students a chance to try out what they’re learning. These days, all my students have laptops and we have a 15- to 20-minute lecture, a lab, another minilecture and lab, and a five-minute wrap-up.

And he continues

It would be so much better to teach less of the Java language and more computer science in the first course, but inflexible instructors make it difficult to take trivia and minutiae out of the curriculum.

I think this is a splendid idea only if all our students have laptops. Now I think that it is better to conduct all classes (at least for the first computer science course) in laboratories rather than in lecture halls. What do you think?

Anyway, go ahead and read the rest of the article and I assure you that you’d be surprised to find some gems from Prof. Horstmann.