Reaction for: "Nightmare on Westwood Avenue" by Jon

A couple of things struck me when reading this. First, it seems that software engineering is very important at this university. It seems to be a program that is preparing people to go work as software engineers at a company. So, like any CS class, a class like this would have to fit into the philosophy of the department involved. For example, Brown does not have a huge stress on software engineering. Admittedly, one of the largest (and arguably most painful) classes that are required in the department is cs32, which is all about software engineering. But is that what is supposed to be taught to computer scientists? But that is a different discussion.

Second, while I'm sure this class was very educational to the students involved, it sounds like they learned the hard way. I have heard this teaching philosophy before, the "school of hard knocks" way of educating. The students will probably never forget the experience of the class, but when they start referring to it as a "Nightmare on Westwood Avenue," then I start to wonder if the educational value of the class was worth the distress and unhappiness that it may have caused in the students. At Brown, I would not be surprised if several of the students involved would end up dropping the class.

Third, it seems that the project that is the focus of the class must be very carefully chosen. If the project is either too big or two small, then you run into serious problems. Presumably, the next year's class will inherit the code (which I think is a very interesting idea, see below), and if the project is too small, then there may not be anything for the next class to do. Unless, of course, they wanted to ship version 2.0 of the product.

The problem of inheriting code also seems to run the problem that if the group from a year ago were a bunch of boneheads, then you are stuck with their design, or having to fix up what they did. While this is realistic, it could cause unnecessary pain to the students involved.

All in all, I would be interested to hear how the class did next year.


Reactions


Lucas's Reaction

While opinions on this vary widely, I'd wager to say that some students refer to CS15 as the "Nightmare on Waterman Street." Does that mean that the course was poorly designed and not well thought-out? Not necessarily. I would wager to say that most TA's and Andy saw 15 this year as a great success, especially considering what I've heard about last year and the difficulties encountered during the language transition. Many see cs15 as a "weeder" course, intentionally difficult to find out who's serious about majoring in CS. I'd be interested in hearing what the H/UTAs think about this perception.


Danah's Reaction

I think Jon hit a point with the idea of what we should be teaching students. My good guess is that the quantity of hackery that resulted in this project due to the desire to get it working before a deadline far outweighed the quality of the design/code. This could be a tremendous problem, especially for new coders and experienced "hackers."


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