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From: windley@iris.ucdavis.edu (Phil Windley)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: What is CS? (Was re First languages)
Message-ID: <1612@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 6 Apr 88 20:31:06 GMT
References: <3684@medusa.cs.purdue.edu> <568@abcom.ATT.COM> <607@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU> <8538@eleazar.Dartmouth.EDU> <1666@ur-tut.UUCP>
Sender: uucp@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: windley@iris.ucdavis.edu (Phil Windley)
Organization: U.C. Davis - College of Engineering
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In article <1666@ur-tut.UUCP> msir_ltd@tut.cc.rochester.edu (Mark Sirota) writes:
>  [ ... some lines deleted ...]
>
>It occurs to me that teaching programming to those in the "creative" arts
>- writing, drama, music, and the like - might be detrimental.  Programming
>requires a certain type of thought, very right-brained, very logical,
>whereas people in these disciplines are on the other side of the brain,
>and think in a more relational, intuitive manner.  Couldn't it be that
>forced programming will change the way these people think, and therefore
>possibly hinder their skills in their chosen area?  Does anyone know of
>any evidence to support or disprove this?

While I'm not an advocate of teaching programming to everyone, I cannot
believe that teaching someone a skill that is inherently different from the
ones in their normal area of study will hinder them.  If this is true,
perhaps we should refrain from teaching them any math at all for fear of
destroying some budding Bach.  Perhaps we should assign right-brained
people to them at birth to perform all these tasks, so they never have to
even think a single thought along those lines.  It appears that the idea,
in the extreme, is pretty ridiculous.

When people outside the major take a CS class they should be introduced to
CS topics much like when a CS student takes a music class or an economics
class for general education credit.  Students can be introduced to
"computation" without understanding that the semicolon doesn't belong
before the else in Pascal.  If people outside (and inside) the discipline
are ever going to understand that CS is more than what a lab technician
does with the PC on his/her desk, we need this kind of class.

Phil Windley
Robotics Research Lab
University of California, Davis