Re: Java tools

From: Malte (forgetme_at_spam_here.nowhere.com)
Date: 03/14/05 

Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:52:35 +0100

John C. Bollinger wrote:
> Malte wrote:
>
>> Oscar kind wrote:
>>
>>> And as to the (probably deserved) jab at my statement, does anyone know
>>> another way to "force" / encourage a student to learn the basics that
>>> are hidden by an IDE?
>>
>>
>>
>> See, I tought IBM's and Oracle's Java classes to students. I believe
>> that teaching and learning Java is entirely possible using an IDE.
>
>
> No doubt you taught the material effectively and your students learned
> it reasonably well. The question, however, is whether the material is
> the _right_ material. Any time devoted to actually learning the
> specifics of the IDE in question (and there will be a fair amount of
> this, whether or not a formal part of the class) is time wasted relative
> to the stated goal of learning the language. To the extent that this
> also obscures lower-level details, your students have not learned all
> that they should.
>
>> Beginners will have to learn OO basics anyway. Even the best of IDE's
>> can't screw up simple exercises that teach simple classes, simple
>> inheritance and polymorphism, for example.
>
>
> Huh? Agreed, IDEs do not tend to get in the way of learning such
> concepts, but they don't generally do anything special to support it,
> either. OO basics are not really the issue anyway.
>
>> Some of the things that are hidden by the IDE (importance of
>> CLASSPATH, compiler options, impact of package structures) can be
>> easily tought in an hour (using Notepad, or, in my case, kwrite or VI).
>
>
> You are making a dangerous mistake: confusing teaching with learning.
> You can cover the details you describe in a short class, but the best
> way for students to _learn_ them is to have to _use_ them. It takes
> more use than just a few exercises.
>

I give up. I assume you'd teach computing by handing out a blank ***
of paper and have students write a bunch of zeroes and ones.
;-)