Don’t want to toot my own horn or anything like that, but I teach classes over at the Extended University – which is part of the University of Arizona. And I was thinking of how I could be more engaging to my students. When I get excited about a subject I am very engaging, but if I have gone over a subject with someone over and over I loose my own excitement which is bad for teaching.
So, I had just finished dropping off a movie I rented the other night and was thinking about this subject as I was driving home. I had decided that I was going to write up some of my personal philosophy on programming and use it to spice up my interactions with my students.
Here’s some of what I came up with:
There are primarily two emotions involved when programming, joy and frustration. Joy when you finally get something working or you discover something that changes the way you think about things. Frustration when things just aren’t working the way they should, or at least the way you think they should. I work through the frustration because I know that there will be joy at the end…somewhere.
Now, you can’t teach joy and frustration (well maybe frustration 
, but I remember some of my first moments of joy with programming. Initially it was in my Engineering 101 class where we had to take Pascal as part of it. But more so was when I actually had an assignment that I had to do on my own and actually completed it. You know the feeling, you’ve been working on something for 2 – 3 hours and finally all the pieces are there, and it Works!
Unfortunately the first thing I remember about programming is the frustration. You see the first computer I had was a TI-99 4/A which came with a Basic interpreter. You could actually get at it by starting it up with no cartridge installed. I had the reference manual on Basic so away I went. I don’t think I got anything to work the way I wanted it to except for some basic print statements and gotos. Then of course came the magazines with pages and pages of code, which I would dutifully type in and hit “Run”…they never did. That was my first experience of debugging, trying to track down an error in someone else’s code. But at least that didn’t deter me too much from continuuing on.
So, here’s my question to those who are listening, why do you program? What do you love about programming? What got you started?
And, of course, if anyone has tips on reaching students please share!
