Why do student struggle in learning programming...

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, I’ve worked with grads, and been hanging around Quora long enough to have a theory on it.

Programming is taught in quite an abstract manner, it’s taught as a science, whereas in the ‘field’, it’s not a science, it’s a craft.

I’ll give you a real world example of something I was working on yesterday…. It’s connecting to a Bluetooth device, and data is being sent to it, but the device isn’t responding the way that it should. Fix it.

Will your CS course help with that?

In my experience, new grads seem to struggle the most with interpreting a business problem, and creating a program that solves it.

A student may be taught how to sort a list in linear time, but they don’t know why they would actually want to.

Software Development needs to be treated as distinct from Computer Science, there is a strong overlap of course, but for me, it’s very much like teaching the chemical composition of concrete, when the student wants to be a builder.

To labour the point a little bit more, you don’t need to know how rubber is manufactured to change a tire.

CS is very important on some areas, but in many, it’s been abstracted by the OS, or Frameworks, or whatever.

Like it or not, in modern software development, we are standing on the shoulders of giants, a lot of what is taught as CS level are solved problems.

I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing, if we can learn about solved problems, maybe we can learn how to solve unsolved ones?

I’d suggest that maybe students struggle to learn programming and software development, as they aren’t actually being taught that, they are being taught something related, but not the actual job of software developer.