So, I was reading Code Complete 2 and come across an interesting passage. Steve McConnell (author of the book) hit home with me on this one: Assignments given in classes are made to get you from beginning to end quickly. However, in the real world this isn’t the case. Requirements change all the time. It would be like a professor changing the program requirements after you have started the program.
This is probably not a surprising concept. Changing requirements is a regular occurrence for real-world developers (or so I hear). If this is the case, why don’t more professors create assignments that model the real-world? Make an assignment that becomes 2 or more assignments. Make the students have to maintain their own code, or (even better) maintain the code of another student. Have them build the solution of each new problem from their solution to the last problem.
I guess this might be outside of the scope of many programming classes. College isn’t trying to train us for our first “real” job, it tries to “make us more well-rounded individuals and teach us to think critically.” But if I were to create the curriculum for a college programming course, I’d like to think I could create assignments that more closely model the real-world than several unrelated assignments scattered through the semester. Or perhaps this all really is nonsense.
Post a Comment