Powerpoint ruins teaching. From students saying "I won't take notes its on the powerpoint, and the powerpoint is on the website", to teachers reading straight off the slides it kills me see an all powerpoint lecture.
The good thing about powerpoint can be that the professor actually thinks about how he is going to present his topic. I find that old-school professors tend to drift a lot.
Because when you take notes, you internalize a lot more than simply reading. It really makes a difference. Worse is when the professor snaps the slides faster than you can write them - meaning much faster than you can comprehend them. Sure I can watch someone flash basic history slides by but when it comes to math, science, obscure stuff there is no way I can catch it off a slide better than if the professor is writing.
I don't doubt it, I'm just saying a bad lecture is probably more about the professor's (& student's) incompetence than about the tools. Eg I'd rather have slides to write on if he's just going to copy from the text.
For me there was a huge difference between a professor going through the process of deriving a formula on a board versus just having it flash up on a Powerpoint slide.
You could probably use Powerpoint to simulate that, but most professors don't. Even if you do show the intermediate steps, I think the gradual process of watching something being written out (as well as then having the time to write it out yourself) let's it sink in better.
Even something like having to decipher the professor's handwriting contributes to better understanding. If it's ambiguous what a particular symbol is, you're forced to think harder about the context it's in to figure it out. I'm not saying lectures should be given with obfuscated notes or anything, but that split second of interpretation your brain has to do adds value in the end.
This is also one of the best ways to teach computer programming. Let also students write programs by hand on paper first. Too many students acquire bad programming habits by brute forcing solutions rather than solving by thinking and researching.
Programming on paper is amazingly bad (I've done it, mostly for exams). Even worse, you will teach programmers that you develop linearly (from top to bottom) and once a line of code is written it cannot be changed. Those are terrible coding habits.
Really brute forcing a solution isn't bad for a first run. If they done it, tell them to make it faster or smaller. Given that they've solved it once, they should understand the problem better.
I write pseudocode on paper before I implement anything, and it has helped me tremendously. In fact, I think programming on paper encourages nonlinear programming. You can DRAW! Use lines and arrows to code blocks. Sure, it might get messy, but doing it on paper gives you a better idea of how your algorithm should work. You make less mistakes because making a mistake is more costly (you have to erase/mark out the mistake), so you tend to be more careful.
When I got into professional programming compilers were a round trip to the machine room away. So one thing we did to save time was to 'desk check' our code. This usually meant a simple simulation using a piece of paper to hold the variables, crossing them out when they were overwritten. At some point I could do it for limited pieces of code by just simulating the code in my head.
Simulating code in your head goes a long way towards writing solid code, you'll be able to hold a model of the data and your code together and see whether it will work or not and fix bugs before your first compile.
I agree, if you can program on paper, you can program on anything. Paper programming forces you to slow down and think.
I'm a CS student the University of Texas, and quite a few of our professors, especially at the entry level programming courses, disallow students from brining computers to class and all our programming tests are all written. This encourages patient THINKING and not sporadic TINKERING.
And about powerpoint: I dislike it because most people do it wrong. The lecture should be guiding the powerpoint, but most people allow the powerpoint to guide the lecture.
Yes. Most people have taken Powerpoint and tried to use it as a replacement for having 3x5 notecards with major points on them so that they don't get lost during a lecture/speech. Unfortunately that is the poorest use of Powerpoint.
But this comes hand-in-hand with the way we choose professors. They aren't usually chosen for their teaching or speaking skills, just for their knowledge and expertise in a particular field.
I program better on a computer because despite my Catholic elementary school penmanship training my hand begins to ache after a few minutes of handwriting, and I write slowly. The longer I have to hold a pen or a pencil the more difficult it becomes to concentrate on anything but how uncomfortable my hands are.
I reach for pencil and paper all the time for solving problems, but if I can't write what has to be written in less than 5-10 minutes it's not worth it.
Well, hopefully nobody is asking you to write legal Java down to the last namespace and semicolon on paper. (I know some classes do this; I think it's foolish.) But writing semi-legal Scheme or pseudocode on paper is easy and no more strange or demanding than doing mathematics on paper. I don't think it deserves a cringe.
Also, if it's some small degree harder to actually physically write the program, I'm not sure that's a bad thing in terms of learning; it encourages you to do more thinking and understanding and less fly-by-wire programming and testing.
Absolutely. My early programming courses all had code-writing on the written exams, all in Scheme. (I think Scheme is particularly well-suited to paper, though, because of its minimal syntax and its "general recursion for everything" approach.)
Programming on a computer---particularly in a REPL language like Scheme---tempts one to "just run it". Writing a program on paper requires reflection and planning: good skills, I think.
I've had to write 100% legal Matlab, Java and C++ in tests (I study Computer Engineering). All of our exams are on paper only.
Actually, I even had a multiple choice question which asked whether in Matlab it was legal to start a variable name with a number. Not the most important thing to know, IMHO, but introductory programming classes here tend to focus on syntax so that the engineering students can get something done quickly.
Regarding math on paper, I actually find it's easier to do math on computer than on paper. Quick and easy calculations (e.g., less than half a page) are often faster on paper, but the long and involved ones require a computer to manage.
I might have different feelings if I didn't use emacs.
Are you one of those people who TeX's their notes while sitting in class? I'm always amazed by that. Wish I could pull it off :)
Long calculations are a pain, but I find doing it by hand is good, so that I can go back and find mistakes. I tend to use one long scratch pads, so that I have a sort of ongoing, live revision control. When I use LaTeX I tend to erase stuff, because I want LaTex to look nice, and of course the erased parts might have been useful later.
I never actually developed note-taking skills. After a semester or two, I gave up on even trying.
Basically, my calculations usually look like this:
interesting quantity < mess[0] < mess[1] < ... < mess[n] < final result
I've found it's very easy to copy mess[j] to a new line, edit, and repeat. It's harder to rewrite mess[j] on paper. Storing complicated expressions in emacs registers is also quite nice.
I wrote code in various languages on paper for tests in college. Even C++ and Java are not horrible if the teacher just asks for you for a code snippet that demonstrates one thing. Obviously "write a whole program that works" assignments were done on a computer :)
People complain about education too much. Kids will find their way. You shouldn't judge a generation until they're over 50 and vote a Republican goofball into office that destroys the American economy. Now they obviously had some bad education.
