Two blasts from the past. Sorry for the long post but hey, this is a frigging blog, not some social media service for attention spans of mere seconds.
First “blast”
When teaching (exercise support sessions) over Zoom, we course teachers have a private chat in Slack to coordinate who goes to which breakout room to help students asking for help. When there’s no acute problems to address, we occasionally chat about random topics.
Yesterday I was participating from the bed using my laptop since I’ve got the flu but was well enough to participate somewhat.
I have had this idea to write the Data structures and Algorithms course materials into a book format. Not to be sold in book stores, but just shared to the students as a single PDF / eBook file.
I remembered doing exactly that, very very long time ago in a discontinued course, and happened to mention this to the other teachers in Slack; that I couldn’t find the book in my computer archives.
“Hold my beer”, said one of the teachers, and voilá, he uploaded that course pdf “book” from 1999 to the Slack channel! As it happens, he was at that time or just before, a student on that course and had archived the material! He is a lot better than me in archiving, apparently, so thanks JLa for that! He also participated in teaching (also) this course, as far as I can remember.
The course, Programming environments, was originally a Mac programming course, by our Department Mac guru who left us a long time ago to work in the industry (good for him). Then later, I implemented the course for programming with C in Windows (thanks to Petzold’s book). Even later I also implemented a version to teach Symbian C++ programming in Nokia devices.
Anyhows, I liked the idea to provide the material in a “book” format to the students, and even distributed the book in an eBook format for them to read. A total of 45 pages. I wish I’d find the original editable document somewhere from my external backup drives or USB drives, would be fun to have it.
Maybe I’ll do this sometime again for some course. Writing can be fun.
The second “blast”
A thing I did find when browsing through my archives, was a department plan to arrange teaching for the study year 2009-2010.
Especially interesting for me was to check out the list of courses our team (software engineering focused teachers/courses) at the department taught that study year (table below).
I will just list the courses about programming or strongly programming related or strongly technical courses:
| Finnish course name | English course name |
|---|---|
| Algoritmit | Algorithms |
| C ohjelmointi | Programming in C |
| C++ | C++ programming |
| Johdatus kääntäjiin | Introduction to compilers |
| Johdatus ohjelmointiin | Introduction to programming |
| Johdatus tietorakenteisiin | Introduction to data structures |
| Logiikka | Logic |
| Ohjelmistojen testaus | Software testing |
| Ohjelmointikielten periaatteet | Principles of programming languages |
| Ohjelmointityö I | Programming assignment I |
| Ohjelmointityö II | Programming assignment II |
| Ohjelmointityö III | Programming assignment III |
| Ohjelmointityö IV | Programming assignment IV |
| OHJY/MacOS/iPhone | Programming environments / Mac/iPhone |
| OHJY / Windows | Programming environments / Windows |
| OHJY / Unix | Programming environments / Unix |
| OHJY/ Symbian | Programming environments / Symbian |
| Olio-ohjelmointi | Object oriented programming |
| Projekti I | Term project for external customers, programming |
| Projekti II | Term project for external customers, often included programming |
| Rinnakkainen ohjelmointi | Parallel / concurrent programming |
| RTCS | Real time computer systems |
| Tietokantojen perusteet | Introduction to databases |
| Unix perusteet | Introduction to Unix |
In some of those courses, doing actual programming by the students might have been a relatively small part of the course. And some of the courses were not offered every year. Just not to inflate the amount of actual programming done in some of these courses.
But – if you compare these strongly programming focused courses of that time to the list of current programming or strongly technical courses in the study program:
| Finnish course name | English course name |
|---|---|
| Laitteet ja tietoverkot | Devices and Data networks |
| Ohjelmointi 1 | Programming 1 |
| Ohjelmointi 2 | Programming 2 |
| Tietorakenteet ja algoritmit | Data Structures and algorithms |
| Tietokannat | Databases |
| Ohjelmointi 3 | Programming 3 |
| Ohjelmointi 4 | Programming 3 |
| Ohjelmistojen laatu ja testaus | Software Quality and testing |
| Bachelor project | Programming project for external customers |
| Master’s project | Systems development /analysis project for external customers |
So at that time around 2010, we had a total of 24 very technical/programming courses in old study program. Currently we have only 10.
There are courses on software engineering and such nowadays too, but they usually do not include learning to construct things and spending a relatively significant amount of time doing that – that is what I mean by a technical course here, and what was done earlier.
The current study program at the MSc level does not have a single course focused on programming. No more than 5-6 years ago, we still had at least one, Embedded software development environments, focusing (mostly) on distributed mobile programming (taught by me and some other teachers). Before that, we (including me) taught, together with Tampere University of Technology, Mobile systems programming course (Symbian, J2ME). All discontinued.
Currently we have nothing about parallel / concurrent programming in the study program. Last week I did one very small demo to at least show an extremely little thing about concurrency in my course on Data structures and algorithms. To let the students at least to be aware that something like this actually exists and could be done. So like 15 minutes of that topic in the whole study program.
Principles of programming languages, logic, compilers — totally gone from the study program in just over ten years.
You know (and I know) that there are as many opinions than there are you-know-what, but in my personal honest opinion, this is not good. Considering the needs of the local software industry.
Of course the technical topics of today would be perhaps different and obviously should be up to date with modern technologies. But if these kinds of topics and the deeply technical perspective on things is missing, there is not even the chance to discuss if they would or should be updated.
…
Well, maybe this is just another case for this:
