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Questions tagged [teaching]

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12 questions
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33 answers

How can I deal with the cargo-cult programming attitude?

I have some computer science students in a compulsory introductory programming course who see a programming language as a set of magic spells, which must be cast in order to achieve some effect (instead of seeing it as a flexible medium for…
Aivar
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10 answers

How can I teach a bright person, with no programming experience, how to program?

I have been asked to take a person in our IT department who has no programming experience but is a smart and capable person and help him move into programming at lets say an entry level developer supporting existing .Net applications. I definitely…
Richard Fantozzi
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99
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34 answers

30 minutes to explain programming to a 15 year old

I've been volunteered to sit down and talk about the life and work of a Developer with a 15 year old work experience student next week. The catches are that I've got just half an hour, and I'll be just one of the people talking to her - other…
Dexter
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46
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13 answers

How to find a programming mentor?

I decided to learn programming. I've been reading SO for few days, and I think I will start with C++, as I read some articles. I am aware of loops, arrays, program logic and objects a little and I need someone to look me over and help me with small…
Dvole
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13 answers

Tutoring students who are struggling with the basics in C++

I am tutoring a few students who are having significant trouble learning the basics of their first programming language: C++. I have known many excellent and bright students who have failed or dropped their first CS course. Everyone I am tutoring…
AdmCrunch
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19 answers

How would you explain multi threading to a seven year old kid?

If you have to explain the concept of multi-threading to a seven year old kid how would you do it? I recently got this question in an interview. I came up with a story using jobs (the task to be done) and workers (the threads) but it was not…
Vinoth Kumar C M
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21
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9 answers

How to teach Exception Handling for New Programmers?

How do you go about teaching Exception Handling to Programmers. All other things are taught easily - Data Structures, ASP.NET, WinForms, WPF, WCF - you name it, everything can be taught easily. With Exception Handling, teaching them…
Kanini
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20
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6 answers

Should I teach my students alloca?

How widely used is alloca in the real world? Should I teach my students to use alloca when it makes sense? Or should I teach them never to use it? Coming from a C++ RAII background, the idea of not having to call free manually sounds promising,…
fredoverflow
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14 answers

University teaches DOS-style C++, how to deal with it

I had been programming for many years but wanted a diploma to make myself more employable. Having already been through university once, I didn't choose a full 5 year computer science major but a shorter, more practically-oriented software…
Toerndev
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10 answers

How do I explain to non-programers what .NET is?

I don't work at a software company, and I'm one of a small handful of people in the company that know anything about programming. I spend a lot of time automating other programs that are used in the office through public APIs, and I've also created…
Eric
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8
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4 answers

Why do textbooks use pseudocode rather than real languages?

In colleges and in algorithm textbooks, it is quite common for the teacher and author to explain control flow in pseudo-code. With the advent of more expressive languages like Python and Haskell among others, is it reasonable that colleges switch to…
Asterisk
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Trying to teach a high school student Dynamic Memory Allocation - what are the best ways to do so?

Copied from stack overflow due to feedback So I want to teach someone how to do dynamic memory allocation using the block padding model. What that means is every memory block is prefixed and postfixed with 4 bytes holding the length of the block in…
user64742
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