interesting question and answers

["Daniel Ajoy" <da.ajoy@xxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting question and answers to the edu-sig (python language discussion
group)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:48:49 -0400
From: "Andy Judkis" 
Subject: [Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question
To: <edu-sig@xxxxxxxxxx>

I've just completed my 6th semester as a teacher, teaching 2 sections per 
semester of a 10th grade course that includes a 4 week introduction to 
programming in Python.  Here's a question from one of my exams:



    Write Python code that will ask the user who is the best looking 
teacher in the school.  The program must loop until the user responds either 
"Mrs. McGrath" or "Mr. Judkis".  If the use responds "Mr. Judkis", the 
program must print out "Excellent choice."  If the user responds "Mrs. 
McGrath", the program must print out "Also a fine choice."  If the user 
responds with anything else, the program must print out "Wrong, sorry." and 
ask again.



Rather than catalog my frustrations, let me just pose a question to you 
all -- how much Python exposure do you think it should take before a student 
should be able to answer this question?  If a student can't even answer 
this, is it reasonable to say that they have learned any programming at all? 
(I know that they might have learned something -about- programming, but that 
is not the same thing.)



Thanks,



Andy Judkis



(By the way, anybody out there going to be at CS4HS next week at CMU?  If so 
I'd love to get together with you . . )



------------------------------

Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2007 19:44:36 -0400
From: Vern Ceder 
Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

Hi,

We do brief surveys with 8th and 9th graders, so I'm somewhat familiar 
with the age and skill level. I would say that *most* students should be 
able to answer this question after 4 weeks (depending on how much 
looping they've done, of course). By "answer" I don't mean necessarily 
get full credit, but at least get the basic idea right - setting up a 
while loop and prompting for user input.

The tricky part is the compound nature of the test - if they haven't 
done that much with boolean expressions, it might be beyond them, while 
looking just for "Mr. Judkis" it wouldn't be. So if they had everything 
else right, but couldn't get the boolean expression right (or figure out 
some work-around with an extra "if" or two[1]), I wouldn't count that as 
a complete failure.

Finally, in answer to your last question, I would say that they hadn't 
learned *much* programming *yet*. ;-)

Seriously, that may not be a good question - presumably they've learnd 
to sequence instructions, to handle some expressions, basic 
input/output, some looping, etc, so it depends on how you set the standard.

HTH,

Vern Ceder

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 02:40:04 -0500
From: Jeff Rush 
Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

Andy Judkis wrote:
> Rather than catalog my frustrations, let me just pose a question to you 
> all -- how much Python exposure do you think it should take before a student 
> should be able to answer this question?  If a student can't even answer 
> this, is it reasonable to say that they have learned any programming at all? 
> (I know that they might have learned something -about- programming, but that 
> is not the same thing.)

No, if they cannot answer this then they have NOT learned any programming at 
all.  It requires them to demonstrate the four very basic programming concepts 
of input, output, conditional branching and operand comparison.  I would 
expect a student to grasp those in the first afternoon of the course, or 
perhaps two afternoons.  I would not expect them to understand formatted I/O 
or container types like lists/tuples or even modules, but the act of writing a 
string, reading a string, comparing two strings and printing a string, yes, 
they should have those down pat very quickly.

So what were your frustrations?  I'm really curious.  I don't have the 
opportunity to ever speak with a teacher of formal education, so I don't know 
what their world is like.

-Jeff


------------------------------