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from the does-it-count-as-a-foreign-language dept.
Mark Guzdial at ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) writes:
I have three reasons for thinking that learning CS is different than learning other STEM disciplines.
- Our infrastructure for teaching CS is younger, smaller, and weaker;
- We don't realize how hard learning to program is;
- CS is so valuable that it changes the affective components of learning.
The author makes compelling arguments to support the claims, ending with:
We are increasingly finding that the emotional component of learning computing (e.g., motivation, feeling of belonging, self-efficacy) is among the most critical variables. When you put more and more students in a high-pressure, competitive setting, and some of whom feel "like" the teacher and some don't, you get emotional complexity that is unlike any other STEM discipline. Not mathematics, any of the sciences, or any of the engineering disciplines are facing growing numbers of majors and non-majors at the same time. That makes learning CS different and harder.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday January 10 2018, @11:28PM
Emotional components aren't science, nor are they engineering. The teams in the Manhattan project, and later at Los Alamos had a few "emotional components", but they don't seem to be asking for engineering recognition based on any of that. Their stories are available, if you care to look for them. Those stories are interesting, in that some of those emotional components added some degree of difficulty to a nearly insoluble problem - but no one is awarding medals, prizes, or money for those emotional problems.