[school-discuss] Collaborative programming education thoughts

[Justin Riddiough <jriddiough@xxxxxxxxx>]

When I took programming classes, it always followed a similar format..

Here is the language, here is hello world, here are the functions, here
are loops...etc.

The programs we had to write were all contained in the book or on disk.

I think people should be able to join programming classes knowing that
they will never need to learn how to program in depth.  It would truly
be a collaborative class where there are designers, project managers,
and QA.

Projects could still be provided a scope..depending on level of
education, the techincal bits could be scaled.  Templates could be
provided for design that just need some minor touching up before handing
off to the programmers.

At each step of the way, there would be some checks to make sure the
project is up to speed and that the ability to quickly bring the project
to a certain step so that handoff times can both be constructive and
productive.

This is important.  Programmers need the social education as much as the
technical education at earlier levels of teaching.  This would open the
door to many more students that want to be part of technology and would
like to explore different real life roles.  Also teaches the critical
skills of collaboration.

At the end, the class could open source the project and give the
developers the access to the code.  If the project is the same as years
before, well..  the developers will either have to improve it under this
plan or rewrite it (but it still is fair for them to use big portions of
the previous code if it solves a particular problem.)

I'm not a teacher and don't think the format of most Schools would
actually allow for something like this.  But, I know I would have
started taking computer classes as soon as I had the option (age wise.)

It might be that the new generations of super cheap computers gives the
project an arduino flavor.

So, one of the biggest problems in teaching programming is teaching the
human interactions that the industry expects.  Also, youth isn't always
taught *what* those different roles are.

Any feedback?  Is it just impractical?
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