[Novalug] Teaching Computers Science

gregory pryzby greg@pryzby.org
Wed Sep 26 09:58:52 EDT 2007


On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 09:47:03AM -0400, Dan Arico wrote:
> My daughter is thinking about doing a computer science major in college. We've 
> been looking over a lot of schools and I'm noticing a certain lack of 
> consistency in the way it's taught.
> 
> Some schools have CS as a separate major, while others include it under math 
> or engineering. A few courses appear to be consistent from school to school, 
> but the programming languages vary wildly.
> 
> I've found several schools that use Visual Basic. Others use Pascal. Most 
> include C/C++. A few include assembler, but most do not. I've even found one 
> that teaches COBOL.
> 
> Anyone have some thoughts about what ought to be included?

Wow...

So, my university took a recent event as a chance to retool and pretty
much dropped most of the engineering school. Now, everything is
physics based. I forget the pitch, but most engineering subjects are
rooted in physics, and even CS can be put there. 

Anyway, I guess the question I have is what does your daughter want to
do, or why does she want to study CS? 

If I had to do it over again, I would get a solid liberal arts degree
and take CS classes (data structures, algorithms, operating systems,
etc). A *good* liberal arts degree will teach you to read, write and
think. Given the basics, you can do the rest yourself.

-- 
greg pryzby                              greg at pryzby dot org
fingerprint: 8A1A DB90 869F 5DD1 D6E9 EEB6 C156 6B04 849F A86F
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