It's sad to see freshman CS students getting thrown into this unknown world of programming with zero understanding of basic programming principle such at simple logic, tools, and even a book. I just witnessed this last semester where the students first class was basically 'intro was a C++'. No books or resources supplied or referenced.
So it even gets better when the instructor implies don't get help from the internet or examples for assignments, in his eyes everything on the internet is bad or wrong. I gathered he basically wanted the students to fail, what a super hero. Glad to see the effort here to help CS students, great job.
it's even worse at the school I graduated from. the intro level course for cs majors is in python, but calculus I is a prereq. so the students who are catching up in math and/or don't quite feel ready for the real intro course have to take the remedial course, which is in c. I was a TA/grader for that course and what a shitshow it was. I don't think the professor ever explained the concept of undefined behavior.
the highlight for me as a grader was the assignment where they first had to define functions outside of main. many of the students didn't understand that you need to actually return values from (non-void) functions. but in a lot of cases, the value they were supposed to return happened to be sitting in $rax, so they would end up producing the correct output. I was never sure what to do in those cases; they lacked the conceptual tools to even understand what they had done wrong.
> the intro level course for cs majors is in python, but calculus I is a prereq. so the students who are catching up in math and/or don't quite feel ready for the real intro course have to take the remedial course, which is in c.
I don't understand, why would students who need to take Calc 1 not just take the normal course the following semester?
I didn't explain that very well. students who were seriously considering the cs major could certainly just take calc their first semester and then take the real intro course next semester.
at the same time, the university basically considered having taken calc in high school to be a proxy for the overall quality of the student's stem education so far. so if you were one of those people, you were encouraged to take the intro intro course first. this was also the course that people would take who were interested in cs but weren't stem majors. it was a poorly designed course for both purposes.
Got it, thanks. Sounds like the "C for Engineers" class I took as a freshman EE. Mine sounds like it was better-designed, though, possibly because it was a gen-ed-type requirement for all engineering degrees.
Definitely more value in taking a udemy type instruction prior just to get introduced to the concepts at your own pace. Nothing has really changed after decades, incredible.
literally just the first course in the cs major sequence. they didn't actually have to do any math. as I mentioned in a sibling comment, the department used calc I as a proxy for the quality of your high school stem education. that was the official reason, anyway. there were a lot of courses with irrelevant prereqs. cs was by far the largest major at the school, and they were constantly short on faculty to actually teach a the courses. a cynical person might think that the track was designed deliberately to stop people from being able to take too many cs courses at once.
So it even gets better when the instructor implies don't get help from the internet or examples for assignments, in his eyes everything on the internet is bad or wrong. I gathered he basically wanted the students to fail, what a super hero. Glad to see the effort here to help CS students, great job.