[sdiy] Can your *really* teach "Engineering"?

[Rainer Buchty]

On Wed, 19 Aug 2009, Florian Anwander wrote:

> The definite prerequisite for us on it is: he has to make clear that 
> he is doing some kind of hobby DIY. We do not ask for it in the 
> application interview. It is necessary, that he is talking of his own 
> impetus about it. Also it does not matter what he is doing - let it be 
> developping VisualBasic programs, running a linux server, building 
> synths, reparing old clocks or modding cars; no matter what, but 
> he/she MUST have a deep interest and some experience in solving 
> problems on his own.

Which is probably the case why he dropped out of university... It's not 
the kind of thinking which lets you easily survive the undergrad years, 
at least in Germany.

I do remember my first semester in CS/EE when I was told that previous 
computer knowledge would not only be unhelpful, but even hindering. I 
noticed what they meant when we started to do recursive programming and 
I asked why I would do such on (back then commonly used) 
stack-restricted architectures like the 6502.

While the tutors didn't understand the question, we later then were 
taught de-recursification. Still they couldn't answer me why we didn't 
do it like this the first time, as it was not only more stack-friendly 
but also included less overhead.

(In retrospective, I find this even worse as the guys who tutored that 
course back then where from the compiler research group...)

Rainer