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• Here's how I learned Here's how I learned (Score: 3, Interesting) by black6host on Saturday May 26 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)

  by black6host (3827) on Saturday May 26 2018, @08:47PM (#684657) Journal

  Bottom-Up and Top-Down go well with Step-wise Improvement. I Use-Modify-Create the aforementioned to create a combination of the above to meet my needs. I learned it at all by myself.

  Starting Score:	1		point
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• Re:Here's how I learned (Score: 2) by BsAtHome on Sunday May 27 2018, @10:31PM

  by BsAtHome (889) on Sunday May 27 2018, @10:31PM (#684933)

  This is interesting because I actually teach programming. Both Bottom-Up and Top-Down are impossible for beginners to understand by my experience. The amount of discipline required and foresight into where you are going is severely lacking in beginners.

  I start with Use-Modify-Create to have the students get a "feel" what a program is. Let them play for a while. The examples used are always very simple and some indications are given what to do next. They continue with (highly supervised) Stepwise-Improvement once they have some rudimentary feel of what is written (without any knowledge of details). Stepwise-Improvement is superior in showing very small steps and the phases in which a program is developed. This is where you start adding terminology, the structure and meaning of programming. Stepwise-Improvement is particularly good at showing the iterative process of development.

  Once that is over, both Bottom-Up and Top-Down methodologies are touched onto by using specific examples of which may be applicable. However, most will never create a large enough program to require this much strict methodological structure. Also, the common organizational development methods are covered like "lone wolfs" and Agile (in many forms and derivatives) and how to do proper cooperative development (and using revision control).

  Most students seem to respond very favorably to this approach.

  Parent

• top-down and bottom-up are not exclusive (Score: 2) by janrinok on Friday June 08 2018, @03:21PM

  by janrinok (52) on Friday June 08 2018, @03:21PM (#690351) Journal

  I was going to say something similar. I was taught to program in the early 1980s. At that time we were taught that you solve a problem (i.e. design the code) in a top-down fashion, but then the code is written bottom-up. Each module is tested when written and eventually you end up with a working solution that meets the design requirement.

  Parent