On 5/16/2014 3:26 AM, AndyW wrote:
On 15/05/2014 13:38, Jerry Stuckle wrote:

Andy, additionally, it depends on your audience. I worked for a number
of years as an instructor. But my audience was programmers for large
companies. For this audience you need experienced programmers who
really know their stuff; every other instructor I knew also had years of
experience programming in what they taught.

I was looking at secondary school teaching but I know what you mean. A
lot of my kids' teachers were straight from university into teaching
with no real world experience. My son was having problems with object
theory in computing and his teacher kept trotting out the Accounts model
for objects that she learned in university which has zero relevance to a
teenage boy.
After a quick conversion into a relevant example ie abstract GUN object
in a computer game with subclasses of pistol, shotgun, BFG etc and he
picked it up right away.
We also looked at dungeons and dragons abstract Player class with elves
and humans as subclasses.
From that it was easy to translate Interfaces, static classes,
extending classes, inheritance etc.
Too many of the 'career teachers' simply do not have enough real world
experience to make thins relevant.

Andy

And I'll never forget the time a friend (and fellow IBMer) of mine's
early teen daughter took a night course on computers (this was back in
the mid-late 80's). On the first night, the instructor held up a 5.25"
diskette and said "This is a floppy disk". The instructor then held up
a 3.5" diskette and said "This is a hard disk". The class was downhill
from there.

Of course this story will be lost on anyone under 35 years old .

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Jerry Stuckle

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