So what I take from all of this is that, from students' perspective, there is not a clear mapping between each "item on the syllabus" and "how it pertains to the course objective."

Perhaps that can be a good project for the LUG. Work with E115 faculty (who always face a barrage of complaints about the course) and enumerate that mapping.

Normal courses do something similar - the syllabus states how the material maps to accreditation requirements.

Cite specific classes where a given piece of E115 knowledge is prerequisite (eg, "In CSC116 students must be able to traverse dir trees via the commandline, thus we are teaching *these* concepts.") Then maybe talk to faculty in the intro engr classes (across ALL disciplines) and say "What were you expecting E115 to teach that students weren't well-prepared for?"

Gather the data, write a report, and submit it to the dean with recommendations. We can work with E-Council.

My intuition is that the best course of action might be to have specialized E115's for different disciplines. I believe MIT did this with great success; give me time to find the reference, I believe CACM wrote about it.

Many E115 skills seem esoteric but are actually widely used. Nukes use Fortran in their internships; other engineers take entire courses in Excel programming.

And take the Ruby example you cited: "puts Dir.new(".").entries"

To those of us on this list, this is intuitive. But the presuppositions required to understand this are: "puts", which means "display something on the screen" which is a cognate of C's puts() function. "Dir" assumes an idea of what a "DIRectory" might be, "new" presumes familiarity with the 'new' OO keyword, and (".") assumes knowledge that "." means "current directory" and that it is an argument to new().

The point is that its easy to say "this should be intuitive" but examining the facts points to a very different conclusion.

flameflameflame! :-P

Jay

Daniel Marcus wrote:

This is the whole problem. e115 has unspoken purposes, and official
purposes.

We don't need to be equipped on Excel conditional cells. That purpose is to
introduce programming. HTML is to introduce coding. Using Putty/X and WinSCP
are sort of useful for Windows folks, but the way it is taught makes it seem
like a useless pain.

The ability to to basic scripting is incredibly useful in today's world. I
can't speak for Python (I've never liked it much) but when I played with
Ruby, it was incredibly intuitive and efficient.

One of the big pains in e115 was learning about file system trees. I really
don't think this is too beyond ANYONE:

*puts Dir.new(".").entries*

(That's Ruby for listing directory contents)

Sure, it might be a big project for the uninitiated to learn how to use that
to make a clone of "ls", but even if it takes two weeks, it achieves the
same thing as the two weeks that are currently spent filling in those darn
diagrams!

Personally, I think that e115 should be split into two classes, each
targeted at a different group, but this discussion really gets beyond the
scope of this thread.

Positively,
Daniel S. Marcus
Omni Impact Small Business Services
Phone: (XXX) 926 9624
Business: daniel@omniimpact.[redacted]
Personal: daniel@d-site.[redacted]
Website: http://omniimpact.com

On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 3:31 PM, Kyle Bolton < kabolton@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

qq. As Ive heard some of what is but never taken, what is taught in csc200?

Also, e115 is not to teach programming. Thats what all the other csc 100s
are for.

You also have to remember this is freshmen, most with no programming
experience, no care to learn programming, and most who will never learn
programming. Exposure is good, but you are better off getting them to come
to a LUG meeting and having more success that way. This said, e115 is
already getting fire from students as a lot of the stuff that is taught
that needs to be, they dont use or dont see a point for as of yet.

Personally, I am all for us working on a presentation involving

rethinking

e115. That said, I think if we really wanted to re-think e115, we would
need
to go back and discuss what the purpose of the class is.

The point is to introduce fundamental concepts. The Excel section's
purpose
is to introduce if-then statements!

So, I think we might to better to (for example) lead e115 as an
exploratory
lab of Python or Ruby programming, including basic file operations,
permissions, and control structures. A program to list a file-tree would
certainly cover the requirement of file systems!

Really, NCSU needs to re-think the way that our departments structure
their
learning to make it more informative and interactive. We should be
result-based, not necessarily process based. I would love to see classes
with challenges where the person with the most efficient algorithm gets
extra credit, and points are docked for poor coding style, not because

you

called a function that kills cells "die()" instead of
"performOneIterationOfGameOfLife()". Not to mention, those poor people
that
have to waste their time with Fortran. (gag.)

Positively,
Daniel S. Marcus
Omni Impact Small Business Services
Phone: (XXX) 926 9624
Business: daniel@omniimpact.[redacted]
Personal: daniel@d-site.[redacted]
Website: http://omniimpact.com


On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Jack Neely < jjneely@ncsu.[redacted] > wrote:

Jay,

Does E115 ever cover OSX?  My two cents would be to cover all of the
basic, common computing platforms supported on campus.

Jack

On Sat, Jan 09, 2010 at 11:35:58AM -0500, jpgoel@ncsu.[redacted] wrote:

Thing is, I think we tend to think of E115 as "intro to linux". But

from

what I hear, it also aims to serve as a "intro to managing your own
computer." This explains why more E115 sections are laptop-based, and

I

think its also a good goal.

I've worked with CSC116 students who didn't take E115 or place out

(they

were still in first year college or something, and thus were not

required

to take it.)

They were extremely bright, but had no concept of what a "directory"

was

or the difference between Windows' "shell" vs "gui". So I agree that

E115

can't just be about "linux", because the course is preparing people

for

hardcore computing classes. So it also needs to cover the bread and

butter

of filesystems and other underpinnings - on both Windows and Linux. It
does us no good to have people who are experts in linux commandline

but

can't see the Windows analogies, they are both important technologies.

As of late, the E115 folks seem to have shifted to more of a
Windows-centric approach to teaching the material. This is fine -

students

will learn whatever linux they need as they take more courses. But I'm

in

favor of bumping up the linux-ness not so it doesn't seem arcane, but
because it will boost students' grades when they enter CSC 116.

Jay

On Sat, January 9, 2010 11:06 am, iyare omoruyi wrote:

I placed out of E115 back in the summer of '96.  It was a summer

session

before being formally accepted as a freshman in the college of
engineering.
We were provided an instructor who gave us classes for like 2 weeks
instruction or so in order to have enough information and place out.
E115,
for me, was just to get over the initial shock of linux.  That is

it.
I

was
able to navigate to files, create directories...the basic stuff.

What
was

lacking was the reason why it should have been taken further;The

benefits

it
would provide later in life.  I think if the college of engineering

where

serious, they would provide something beyond E115.  But then again,

I

guess
they figure "You know where the library is."

Iyare

10 years of newbiness

On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 9:09 AM, Daniel Underwood
< daniel.underwood@ncsu.[redacted] >wrote:

I don't get it. What's wrong with the current material?  I kinda

like

it. Granted, it's simple, and granted, it doesn't represent the

state
of

Linux art.  Is the dissatisfaction just due to the fact that the

course

does a poor job of "selling" Linux?
--
Daniel Underwood
North Carolina State University
Graduate Student - Operations Research
email: daniel.underwood@ncsu.[redacted]
phone: XXX.302.3291
web:

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~djunderw/ < http://www4.ncsu.edu/%7Edjunderw/ ><
http://www4.ncsu.edu/%7Edjunderw/ >

--
Jack Neely < jjneely@ncsu.[redacted] >
Linux Czar, OIT Campus Linux Services
Office of Information Technology, NC State University
GPG Fingerprint: 1917 5AC1 E828 9337 7AA4  EA6B 213B 765F 3B6A 5B89

--
Kyle Bolton
Cisco Certified Networking Associate (CCNA)
E115 Senior Instructor
ITECS EOS HelpDesk Consultant
Electrical And Computer Engineering
North Carolina State University