If you wanted to introduce every industry best practice in an intro course you’d never get to the actual programming.
It would be good to have a 1 credit course(one hour a week) where you learn industry best practices like version control, testing and stuff like that. But it definitely shouldn’t be at the start.
I teachers were using automated tests instead of printf in their intro courses, it would be so much better. I don’t think that introducing all the various kind of tests is usefull, but just showing the concept of automated tests instead of manual ones would be a huge step forward.
The thing is the way they motivate new students to learn programming is by having them write programs that do something. Making a test green isn’t as motivating as visually seeing the output of your work, and test fixtures can be complex to set up depending on the language. I mean students don’t learn how to factor their code into methods until later into such a course, they’re learning if statements and for loops and basic programming constructs. Don’t you think having to explain setting up test fixtures and dependency inversion is a bit too much for people at that level?
If you wanted to introduce every industry best practice in an intro course you’d never get to the actual programming.
It would be good to have a 1 credit course(one hour a week) where you learn industry best practices like version control, testing and stuff like that. But it definitely shouldn’t be at the start.
I teachers were using automated tests instead of printf in their intro courses, it would be so much better. I don’t think that introducing all the various kind of tests is usefull, but just showing the concept of automated tests instead of manual ones would be a huge step forward.
The thing is the way they motivate new students to learn programming is by having them write programs that do something. Making a test green isn’t as motivating as visually seeing the output of your work, and test fixtures can be complex to set up depending on the language. I mean students don’t learn how to factor their code into methods until later into such a course, they’re learning if statements and for loops and basic programming constructs. Don’t you think having to explain setting up test fixtures and dependency inversion is a bit too much for people at that level?