Feedback on university IT Education

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• I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

[This is an article written in 2009. I have collected some of the articles in <IT author>. In the past two days, I have seen feedback from students of the Software Institute on teaching. It seems that some problems have not been solved. The Education Department will hold teaching seminars from time to visit the world's famous universities and companies. How many years will they visit? Will they ask the graduated students for comments? Should students wait year after year for it to become better? ]

[Original post: http://yishan.cc/blogs/xin/archive/2009/08/19/it.aspx]

In China's college education system, about 10% of students belong to IT-related majors (Computer Science, software, MIS, electronic engineering, software engineering, etc ). After graduation, these students will become practitioners or users in the IT industry. They are the hope of the IT industry. After four to six years of education, do these students have any feedback on this education system? I asked some software students who have just graduated. What is the urgent change in software education? Below are some answers:

*** What do students want to say ***

A)Practice!Software Education is inseparable from practice. do not emphasize closed exams too much. Teachers must practice and practice students. There is a lot of difference between creating a project for a real customer and imagining a demand for a project. Writing programs from the beginning and maintaining code written by others are quite different. There is no real demand, no incremental software development, no team cooperation, and most of the theories in programming and software engineering are empty talk.

B)Why!Students are confused when they take many classes. What are the meanings of these classes? Why are there so many principles, data structures, Red Trees, black trees, patterns, and algorithms? I don't know how to use what I learned. The teacher does not seem to want to tell us the meaning of these courses in practice (or have they never practiced? ). Students only have to memorize the exam and forget it after the exam.

C)Lay a good foundation and learn from others!Basic courses, especially algorithms, data structures, compilation principles, and operating systems. The content of other courses can be learned by yourself.

D)IT education is not just code!Software education is not an isolated entity. We hope to associate liberal arts knowledge with design in software education; and Include interesting development history in the software/IT Industry (talking about Turing, von noriman, let's talk about Smalltalk, the source and stream of various languages ). Cultivate Students' Interest, enthusiasm, and sensitivity in this industry. Encourage interaction, introduce related forums and websites to students, and broaden your horizons.

[I suggest you read "The top of the waves"]

* ** What I see ***

As a result of my work, I have visited more than 10 software or computer schools over the past few years and discussed with many teachers and students. I have also been in touch with students from various schools at the Microsoft Asia Research Institute. After much talk, I have the following ideas. Here I mainly talk about computer software education.

No one else can come.

All the schools decide their major destinations based on the scores of the College Entrance Examination/postgraduate entrance exam. I heard that some students who like to play games especially want to come to the software College, but they cannot come because of their poor scores. Some students with good performance preferred the Software Major, because everyone said this major is a good job. However, when I was about to graduate, I found something wrong, so some people regretted: "In fact, I don't like programming. I want to switch ." Hi, how nice it would be if you left your location for students who liked to play games.

Regulations of Academic Affairs Office

The teacher reported that he wanted to train the team spirit of his students. At the end of the assignment, he asked the students to complete a project by group, but he did not expect the Academic Affairs Office to disagree. The Academic Affairs office insists that all students must do their homework independently and cannot engage in team collaboration. The reason is that after team collaboration, some people will be lazy!

In fact, if a student is asked to do it by himself, he/she may also be confused and plagiarized. In addition, because of the lack of collaboration, a person cannot complete high-quality software, and a single employee is more likely to copy. In the end, the teacher won't be able to compete with the Academic Affairs Office, so every student had to create a separate project. It is very difficult for an ordinary student to complete a project. What should I do? So I had to "Reference" other people's things. Is anyone responsible for testing? No. This is one of the reasons that 40 or 50 students in each class only have 4-5 assignments. Can teachers carefully review so many projects? Obviously not. But the rules of the Academic Affairs Office are confused. It is said that in some schools, the Academic Affairs Office is very strong and can determine the performance appraisal of teachers.

Knowledge and skills

Many people think that a university is a place to teach knowledge. A lot of Knowledge can be taught, and students can find and learn by themselves. For example, some rules of the programming language, if you forget it at work, you can check the information now, or write a test program to verify it. However, the Skill (Skill) can be obtained and optimized only after repeated training. I have seen that students often recite "High Cohesion and low coupling in Design", but they do not know how to apply it in practice. Just as everyone can theoretically master how to play Go-"Let each step take the most valuable key points in the world", but in practice, the game is broken and cannot be broken.

Can we take less dead knowledge and more skills during the exam? What skills can be practiced in school? Many:

• Ability to learn by yourself (can I learn a language and then apply it? Why do I have to explain it to the teacher first ?)
• Inter-personal awareness)
• Ability to express your thoughts (start with a PPT presentation)
• Persuasion affects the capabilities of peers (How can teams move forward based on their own ideas when working together ?)
• Ability to develop and execute a plan (it is your own plan, not the plan prepared by the teacher)
• Summary: ability to improve (Can I summarize and improve it calmly after a project ?)

More about knowledge, skills, andOpposite skill:

The opposite of skill-cube and Imitation

Basic knowledge is solid-but the interview cannot be done. What should I do?

 

The purpose of school education

One year, I taught a class of junior students who reflected the pressure on the course (compilation principles, databases, etc ), I suggested whether to move the software engineering to my senior so that the database knowledge they learned can be used better. the teachers in the Department listed a lot of concerns. The most important thing is that students have to take a postgraduate entrance exam when they are in their senior year, so they cannot take too many courses. They should have time to review the postgraduate entrance exam! After talking for a long time, I finally realized thatMake meaningful lessons for students"And"Give students time to prepare for postgraduate entrance exams"Select the latter between the two. In fact, the goal of tianchao school is almost so great-it's time for students to smoothly enter the next stage. Under the guidance of this idea:

The sixth grade of primary school starts to review and prepares for minor improvement;
The third day of the Review, preparing to raise;
The third year begins to review and prepares to go to the university;
The Senior will begin to review and prepare for postgraduate entrance exams;

Some students have to spend a lot of time preparing to take an exam ".

Finally, when students arrive at the society, they find that they no longer have an exam. What should they do? Have the school taught them?

 

Teachers, have you ever taught students to "forge ahead with reform and innovate "?

 

To innovate, How to teach innovation

When you go to the university to listen to leadership reports, you will hear many "innovations" and vocabulary related to "innovations. You think the leaders of this school really want to innovate. On the other hand, I have heard some people reflect that teaching materials, teaching plans, and teaching methods have remained unchanged for several or even more years. They are very different from reality. Don't teachers want to innovate in teaching? Later, someone familiar with this story told me that software-related majors are very popular and the graduation prospects are also good. Some computer teachers can get a lot of projects and have a lot of funds, teachers and leaders are busy starting a company. Why should they innovate in teaching? Why didn't I reuse my teaching plan a few years ago ?!

How to teach innovation in the Software Institute? In addition to laying a solid foundation for students, one thing the school can do is-

Allow students to perform the experiment. If the experiment fails, the students attempt to perform the experiment again.

I don't have to repeat Edison's story of inventing practical electric lights after thousands of failures. Innovation is not a formula deduction, nor a solution that can be imitated once examples are learned. Give students the opportunity to test and fail. Someone asked-if a student fails, how can he score the course? If you can sum up your experience carefully. You can also get a better score. These students are truly at work, and previous failed experiences and lessons can help them better innovate. When I teach students the software engineering course, the scoring criteria are roughly:

1. Have innovative ideas, achieve success, and optimize.
2. If you have innovative ideas but fail, you can summarize them carefully and optimize them.
3. Without innovative ideas, you can successfully implement mediocre plans. Good.

Some blogs about innovation:

Innovation-cube owners in wangwu Village

Innovation in the IT industry-misunderstandings of Innovation

Clear

On the one hand, students of different grades of computer science and software college are of the same age and background. The teacher is planting and harvesting just like planting crops. Each course and assignment starts from the beginning. Everyone knows as much as they know. Everyone is the thinking of science and engineering students.

After some software colleges receive dual-certificate students, the situation is better. After all, some other industry and experienced students come in. These teams can complement each other and help students. I suggest you tryBreak the configuration mode of "clear colors"Many schools have design majors such as "Industrial Design" and Management Majors such as "Economic Management". In fact, they can attend classes and projects with software students in the school, take credit.

Salmon Model

Many students have carefully studied a lot of Software Knowledge in the school, and they are very good at it, so they graduated with great ambition. However, when they arrived at the work unit, they found that the project team was old and middle-aged, and there were people from various backgrounds. No one needs to design new software from the ground up. They have to read other people's code and maintain the software system. I wrote the "salmon model" in the book "The path to mountains ":

Mr. Xiaohui from the Software Institute complained to a Chao that the software engineering course seemed easy and difficult to teach.

Xiao Hui said: I used to give lectures based on the classic waterfall model. I thought it would be a great building, but the actual situation is as follows:

1. Demand Analysis: students do not know what the enterprise needs. They go to bed in class.

2. design phase: the students drew a lot of UML diagrams and various shapes and shapes using design tools.

3. Implementation phase: the students started a heated discussion, and the UML diagram was already thrown to one side.

4. stable stage: one in ten students start to write code, and others do not know what to do. code cannot work in most cases, and all the black and white box tests that have been designed cannot begin.

5. Release Phase: This phase only takes one day, that is, the day of the last check, and someone else is debugging the program.

6. maintenance phase: the course is over, and students have no maintenance for their products. They have a holiday!

In the end, most of the students said they did not learn anything. next semester, a new group of students will come in and repeat this process...

In fact, a software engineer's career development in the real world seems to be the opposite of a waterfall:

1. Enter the company after graduation and start to maintain some existing software (maintenance phase)

2. Be able to change some bugs in the project, and then release small-scale updates (stable/release phase)

3. Responsible for rewriting a small module with no documentation and writing a lot of code (implementation phase)

If you can still do this, you will enter the next stage:

4. Have the opportunity to design relatively large modules and write some documents by yourself (design phase)

It took a long time to develop to the following stage...

5. Have the opportunity to talk to users about new projects (Demand Analysis)

Can software engineering courses be arranged like this? You can try this process:

1. Start to maintain the programs developed by previous students and understand the programs.

2. Find bugs, change bugs, and refactor a small part of code to meet your needs.

3. Some developers can develop test cases.

4. incremental development based on existing versions

A) understand the requirement (what is the customer's requirement at this time)

B) Design

C) Development

D) regression testing (use the test cases developed above to ensure software quality)

Xiao hui asked: What is this model?

A Chao said: Well, it looks like it goes from the bottom of the waterfall to the source step by step. It may be called the "salmon migration model" or the "salmon model" for short"

In school, we may wish to experiment with different models and learning methods.

Study Tour

Many schools seem to attach great importance to communication with the industry. Their leaders often visit high-level schools and companies around the world. Visiting, feeling, eating, taking a group photo, returning to China... Visit again, emotion ,...

I will not talk much about it. I will read the following two jokes:

 

Http://sports.sina.com.cn/c/2011-10-27/08005804467.shtml

In his memory, the Chinese Football Association sent a delegation to Japan almost every year. As for the effect, he bluntly said: "Chinese football has not improved even after so many surveys ."

Some Japanese football people mentioned that you always like to emphasize "national conditions". Of course, we also understand that, after all, everyone belongs to two different social systems, but this is definitely not a reason, should not be left blank.

 

The jelly in wangwu village went to achicang's house and said it was looking for something. alicang helped him find it for a long time, but it was fruitless. The last two were tired, And a Chao invited jelly to have a fried noodle.

A Chao asked: Where did you lose something?

A: probably in my own home.

Q: Why come to my house?

A: My house has no lights. You have lights here!

 

Expected

Many people have various expectations for the school, I have had expectations, Hope (http://www.cnblogs.com/xinz/archive/2010/11/27/1889829.html ).

However, the higher the expectation is, the more passive it is, and the more disappointed it is, as some people say-going to college, but the result is gone to college.

Mark tween said:

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

 

When I was young, I didn't know what this sentence meant. Now I seem to understand it. when people grow and mature, most people may not rely solely on the school and complain about the school.-Why didn't you teach me well?

 

Not only should you not waste time relying on your school, but you should also intentionally get rid of the impact of your school (and other "systems") on you-you own your own education, don't let your school interfere with it. you are responsible for your own education and growth. Are textbooks poor? Is there a network and ivory tower uncomfortable? Go to the society.

Some people say:

People are mature on the road

 

But you have to go on the road, depending on the system, depending on the young mentor, depending on... it's better to rely on yourself, let's go on your own.

 

2011/12/3