To Read Is To Learn
September 29th, 2009
Lots of people have said that computer science students should read code as well as write it. Not many people have gone the next step and designed a course around that idea, which is why I was excited to read Jason Montojo’s recent post, and the course outline he has put together. Jason did several undergrad projects with me, is one of the co-authors on Practical Programming, and plans to finish his M.Sc. in a few months—if anyone can pull this off, he can, and I’m sure he’d welcome your feedback.
Some of this could be used to enhance our existing course CSC302. Currently, we kick off the course by getting the students to trawl through an existing large open source code base, and make sense of it by reverse engineering the design, drawing architectural models, etc. They then have to make changes to the code: correct bugs, add new features etc. Some more specific code reading tasks would be neat.