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Teaching Programming to Non-Developers

Posted by Cliff on from the illumination-of-the-non-enlightened dept.

Eric asks: "I'm teaching a web application development class at a local public university. The students are seniors in the business program; the course is intended to expose them to development practice (we're using PHP and MySQL) but is not intended to turn them into developers. So what would the Slashdot community recommend within the curriculum? How would you teach web development to the managers of the future, and why?"

1 of 74 comments (clear)

  1. Something not mentioned by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Here is a very realistic way to teach this class.
    Assume the class is 10 weeks
    Week 1: Design a web page that pulls data from the database and formats it. By the end of the week it not only needs to work, but you should have documented the time it took to do each task and make sure you comment your code.
    Week 2: Add a new feature. Make this feature vague. Again be sure to document your code and keep track of your time.
    Week 3: Act upset that no one got the feature right. Add a new feature, fix the old feature, and have everyone trade ownership of the code. Hence everyone is now working on code they did not write. (I hope everyone did a good job at documeting their code) Be sure to also keep track of your time.
    Week 4: Now present a Gantt Chart of schedules based on everyone's tracking of time. Now add another new feature, did everyone fix the old feature? Trade code again, be sure to keep track of your time, document code and make sure you hit your milestones as per the Gannt chart or this will affect your grade.
    Week 5: Now that everyone is pissed off. Ask the class what they have learned in business classes that could make this process better? Then take that information and what you hope to teach about good documentation and design and start all over again. This time I am sure everyone will be listening.
    Week 6-10: Still trade code, document, and keep schedules. But this time I think everyone will see the wisdom in what you are teaching.

    The point it seems everyone is making is don't so much teach them how to code, as much as show them how to manage someone who codes by placing them in the programmer's position.