It’s been a while. Not as long as it’s been before. But. Awhile…
The term for UTG officially started on January 24th or so, not that anybody really showed up or started teaching (including myself…ahem…). My first classes were last week, so, it’s been a little busy around here. For some unknown and inexplicable reason, I decided to pick up three classes at UTG that I’ve never taught before, one of which is completely new and one of which hasn’t been taught in 3 years. This means that I need to develop most of the class material myself which really just takes an inordinate amount of time…
The brand new class is a programming logic and design course that is intended to teach new CS students on how to actually solve a problem. The tragic thing about some of our students here is that they know the syntax of a language well but they are unable to turn a word problem like “take a set of numbers and calculate the average” into a working solution. Hopefully this class will address that issue a bit. The course is going to be taught using several versions of a language called Racket, which is based of Scheme, which for those keeping score at home is a bit like lisp. I decided on the use of this language for a number of reasons, the biggest of which is that the book is available for free online at http://www.htdp.org/ and draft second edition at http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/HtDP2e/ .
The language also comes with a nice IDE that allows students to easily play around with the language. That combined with the fact that the language it’s self does not have a complicated syntax means I should be able to get into more advanced computer science topics fairly quickly.
Other than that, I’m teaching a Introduction to Java course, which is the language used in all other programming classes here and a general introduction to computer science. I’m hoping that even in the Java course I’ll be able to incorporate more problem solving concepts found in the How to Design Programs book.