Students choose Visual J# over BlueJ, JCreator, and other IDE's
I received this note from Brian Scarbeau, a high school AP Computer Science teacher in Orlando, Florida.
Thought I’d pass this along. . . My AP students are now using the MBCS hands on. I don’t require them to use an IDE and they choose either bluej, JCreator or VS. Some started to use Visual Studio for the first time today and they were blown away by the intellisense and how easy it was to use. Needless to say that got the attention of the other students that were using the other ide’s. Guess what IDE all my students will be using tomorrow in class?
At Microsoft we spend lots of time, money, and energy educating the academic community about the merits of our tools and platform, but we obviously can't talk to every student or teacher out there. So when students independently choose Visual Studio over other IDE's - without any influence from their teacher - it reminds that we're building a development tool that makes life easier for millions of people - students and professional developers alike.
One of the main reasons I came to Microsoft to do marketing in the Visual Studio group is because of my academic experience. I graduated from the University of Florida (Go Gators!) the same semester that Microsoft released Visual Studio .NET. I remember reading about the product and trying it for the first time and being so amazed at the capabilities. The only unfortunate part about my experience was that the timing of my education didn't permit me to use Visual Studio .NET as part of my college career since it wasn't released yet. So when I was given the opportunity to come work for Microsoft and help teachers and students realize how Visual Studio .NET could help them be successful in their college careers and beyond, I couldn't pass up the opportunity. I am living my dream job every day, and my only regret is that I don't have more hours in the day with which to code. =)
Comments
- Anonymous
January 13, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
Charles, I think that it is worth noting that these are students who are in Advanced Placement and have pretty good programming backgrounds. A key element in keeping students interested in programming and development is giving them opportunities to feel successful. Intellisense can help students feel successful and help them avoid some of the frustrations that can undermine the work that their teachers have done to get (and keep) them interested in programming. - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
> I don’t require them to use an IDE
> and they choose either bluej,
> JCreator or VS.
No Eclipse? The jUnit integration alone is worth it. - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
AP CS students do have to write tests without an IDE. And most AP CS classes are taught using IDEs. Students do learn well with IDEs and some of us have years worth of experience teaching AP CS and other programming classes to support the idea that it works.
A graphing calculator is more or less required for the AP Calculus exam BTW. - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
"Maybe we need to sanction some kind of in-depth study?"
Actually, that's a very interesting idea. I think that such a study would be valuable not only to the professors/teachers and students, but also to companies that produce visual IDE's like Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong, for my day to day, I do my dirty deed with VS.Net 2003 and I love it and I look forward to 2k5 (tremendously) ;) but I think that if I had started out on VS IDE, I would have missed out on a lot of finer details of working with software. - Anonymous
January 13, 2005
Any thoughts on how we could best approach an in-depth study? I could lobby for funding on my side. I agree, I think it would be great to pull out the tape measure and see exactly which approach works best. Of course, some students may learn best with different methods, but if you had to pick one which way should you go? I have no idea how to go about researching this in a way which eliminates bias. - Anonymous
January 14, 2005
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
January 14, 2005
Another point that I would like to make is that I think that when teaching at such an early stage, it is a mistake to even get started with code. A total mistake.
Yes, students would get bored otherwise, but it's still a mistake nonetheless. My suggestion is that they are not taught a particular language, as is the case here, but rather taught several languages, even if on an introductory level. The main goal of teaching CS students is not so they are productive (not this early in their education anyways), but they they can understand logic, so that they can solve problems, so that they can teach a machine to do their bidding. Often times, a general purpose language like Java or C# is easy to learn and easy to use, but it's entirely clumsy at doing some tasks that, for example, Prolog or Scheme excels at. Students should not be tied to a language at this level, ever. I feel that that type of experience should come from internships and outside of the academic arena.
In addition, I think that the first few course of any CS curriculum should really focus on software engineering (testing, orthagonal, documentation, design, programming practices, teamwork, did I mention testing). I've found that these are always the last subjects to be covered (if at all)!
If I were to compare CS to physics for example, the main course should cover the theory and the ideas. The actual programming and should be relegated to labs, just like experiments in any low level collegiate physics course. - Anonymous
May 29, 2009
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