Re: removing the largest item from the list

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Date: 15 Mar 2004 13:46:06 GMT

anders t wrote:
> Quoting Andrzej Lewandowski in comp.lang.prolog:
 
>>Yes, but not by doing somebody's homework.
 
> I hope you understand at least in part where I'm coming from here.
>
> Put another way:
>
> Why don't the Prolog people/AI people (often the same, no?) use the 6-7
> weeks they have with thousands and thousands of students to buy them over
> to their paradigm by helping them over that threshold? That would enable
> more of the students to drive deeper into Prolog and possibly finish the
> course with a desire to take that vital "2nd course".

So are you suggesting that the "thousands and thousands of students" who are
learning Prolog should swamp this newsgroup with trivial questions?

Or are you suggesting that people who teach Prolog do so in a way different
from people who teach other sorts of programming? If so, I don't see any
evidence of that. My experience of teaching any sort of programming is that
students need to be encouraged to think through it themselves and that
sometimes if they are show answers too early they never properly learn how
to program.

Right now I am teaching a course in programming (not in Prolog however) and
as an experiment I interviewed those stuents on the course who did badly on
the mid-term test. I found a common feature of these students was an
over-readiness to jump to model answers or to seek help without thinking it
through first. When I asked these students to demonstrate their lab work,
they showed me model answers they'd copied, and sometimes trivially modified
and said "Oh, I looked through the answers and now I understand it". They
didn't understand it - these are people who after a term and a half of
learning to program (in Java actually) couldn't string together half a
dozen lines of syntactically correct code that resembled a correct solution.

Matthew Huntbach

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