I'm going to be teaching a scripting and tool development class to a group of 3D animators. In amongst teaching them coding fundamentals, I plan to have them pick a repetitive task they must perform frequently and have them iteratively develop a tool to automate or simplify this task as an assignment. What I'd like to know are some cri...
For a few years I was a teaching assistant for an introduction to programming module - Java for first year undergraduates. Mostly it went well and we managed to get object-oriented programming across to the students quite well, but one thing that students rarely saw the point of was interfaces. Pretty much any explanation we gave eithe...
I'm currently teaching an employee ECMA script as it is needed in maintaining a workflow system we use and i need some challenges to use as exercises. We have covered most of the language and he is now pretty familiar with the syntax so i just need him to get using it. I need to provide him exercises which make him think logically. For...
I teach C and C++ and I was just wondering if there are good overview of the C++0x features. I am going to read the standard, but that will take time and I'm definitely going to make it for this semester (next year hopefully). For this semester I just want to make one extra lecture about C++0x (and maybe make sure that none of the taugh...
I know what I was taught in my Software Engineering Courses at school, I know what i was taught in my first year of being a software engineer, and years later I now can understand what is important in software development. If you could only teach 3 software principles/philosophies to a entry level software engineer, what would they be? ...
Which is more suited as the platform for a first course in computing: Python 2 or Python 3? Reason for asking your opinion: Python 2 is used in the vast majority of installations worlwide, but Python 3 is the coming thing. ...
Has anyone had any experience in teaching programming in C to undergraduate students, who can be presumed never to have seen an editor before in their lives? I might soon face that predicament, and was thinking of basing myself on the K&R "The C Programming Language" book. Has anyone had a similar experience? What are your ideas/recomme...
I was asked in an interview: How would you explain what an iPad is to your grandfather? please give some realistic idea to really make this happen... ...
I am student currently attending my fourth year at a Swedish university and will, if all goes well, take my Master's degree in Computer Science in winter of 2011. It is a respectible university, at least here, and am overall satisfied with my choice - both of university and major. While I've learned much in the courses I've attended, I ...
So here i am trying to teach my friend the art of C++. He is no newbie to programming, but his area of expertise is somewhat further away from C++. He knows html, php and java fairly well, but it seems this is of no use when it comes to writing a C++ program. We already went through the basics, talked about pointers and such. He even had...
I googled. I asked in forums but I could not find any forum, newsgroup or discussion boards for "trainers" (teachers, coachers) and supporters (writers of courses, sysadmins of labs, et al) of professional courses for IT developers Might be the certified by major vendors trainers have the sites with forums but they are closed to non-...
The discussion in this question is the direct cause for me asking this question. The more general reason is the fact that I often have to explain R use to people that are only familiar with SPSS. I know most of the basics of SPSS, as we still use it in the base course statistics. But as I'm more of an R guy, it's difficult to know how SP...
I'm helping a professor for some lectures in OO and numerical algorithm in particular problem like to find the root of a function, minimization, interpolation, ... the problem is that he wants to teach at the same time OO with C++. I think that usual algorithms like these are implemented using procedural programming, at least you can use...
I'm teaching a course in which students get their first experience programming in C. We're using gcc on Linux and (for beginning students) the user experience is terrible. I'm looking for a C front end that will do one or more of the following: If it cannot find a .h file, announce the fact and shut up. Don't spray screenfuls of garb...
I'm going to be giving a presentation a little later to a student ACM chapter about how they can utilize debugging tools to solve problems in their code. Any ideas for a (preferably short) bit of example code I can use to demo breakpoints, variable inspection, etc.? My main worry is that I don't want to patronize them by using "Hello Wo...
NOTE: Updated and rewritten This question has been redone and updated. Please pardon outdated references below. Thanks. I've seen a lot of javascript code lately that looks wrong to me. What should I suggest as a better code pattern in this situation? I'll reproduce the code that I've seen and a short description for each one: Code bl...
A few friends and I are doing a self-study on Computer Science/Programming and taking the Computer Science AP A exam. Although I have experience in programming in a few languages, it's still difficult for me to explain some concepts such as OOP and memory management. Are there are interesting diagrams or infographics that could explain ...
There's lots that can be taught about transactions in databases (and I'm really talking about relational databases here, since that's what I'm currently teaching), but I believe it's easy to teach the wrong things. Given that students are very likely going to forget most of what you say before they leave the lecture room, where should th...
I'm looking for interesting programming puzzles, problems or challenges suitable for a class of chemistry majors learning C as their first programming language. Do you have any recommendations? ...
I know that there is a long debate regarding this matter. I also understand that this is strictly not a programming question. But I am asking here as this platform contains wide range of experts from different realms. When we got admitted in a Computer Science and Engineering(CSE) course in university, we were first taught C. The cours...