and just have a real person answer the phone in the first place? Most people despise these automated systems, and therefore they do nothing more than escalate the situation. What ever happened to the days when you made a call and got to talk to an actual person? Maybe rather than spending a bunch of time and money developing silly technologies such as this, the time and money should be spent on hiring someone to answer the phone!!!
Coming from the real world of programming (and interviewing newbies straight from college) I think that the colleges and universities need to be a bit more careful how they choose the development environments they use. Get back to the basics! A student needs to learn and understand concepts. These concepts will carry them throughout their life/career. Learning a proprietary IDE should be the last thing on a student's mind. If given proper instruction, a student can easily teach themselves any IDE if/when they need it. If given a proprietary IDE to learn on, the student is lost when faced with a different one.
More needs to be taught on understanding what "compiling" and "linking" actually is, so that when compile errors occur, it is easier for them to track them down and fix them. The school I attended did almost no teaching on any type of build system (makefiles, etc.) and almost nothing on using any debugger. These are essential tools for the real world, even when using an advanced IDE that does most of the work for you.
If you understand the lowest level, you can most certainly learn/understand higher levels, but not vice versa necessarily. Therefore, stick to the basics, a good command line, with instructions on how to invoke the compiler for that platform, and how to run the program if/when it compiles. I really don't care what OS it is running. It doesn't matter.
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and just have a real person answer the phone in the first place? Most people despise these automated systems, and therefore they do nothing more than escalate the situation. What ever happened to the days when you made a call and got to talk to an actual person? Maybe rather than spending a bunch of time and money developing silly technologies such as this, the time and money should be spent on hiring someone to answer the phone!!!
Coming from the real world of programming (and interviewing newbies straight from college) I think that the colleges and universities need to be a bit more careful how they choose the development environments they use. Get back to the basics! A student needs to learn and understand concepts. These concepts will carry them throughout their life/career. Learning a proprietary IDE should be the last thing on a student's mind. If given proper instruction, a student can easily teach themselves any IDE if/when they need it. If given a proprietary IDE to learn on, the student is lost when faced with a different one.
More needs to be taught on understanding what "compiling" and "linking" actually is, so that when compile errors occur, it is easier for them to track them down and fix them. The school I attended did almost no teaching on any type of build system (makefiles, etc.) and almost nothing on using any debugger. These are essential tools for the real world, even when using an advanced IDE that does most of the work for you.
If you understand the lowest level, you can most certainly learn/understand higher levels, but not vice versa necessarily. Therefore, stick to the basics, a good command line, with instructions on how to invoke the compiler for that platform, and how to run the program if/when it compiles. I really don't care what OS it is running. It doesn't matter.