[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2016-10-14 09:18, Michael Schnell via Lazarus wrote:
> The OP explained that his main purpose is to introduce more fun in the 
> education.  That can be done by plunging into programming directly with 
> GUI development.

So for somebody that doesn't know anything about programming, then
suddenly using a Visual Form Designer, but when they look at the code
that was generated they have NO idea what is going on. The don't know
what a Class is, they don't know what Inheritance is. They don't know
what Event Handlers are, what Properties are, what's the difference
between 'var' and 'const' parameters etc.

They will be thrown into the deep end and sink. The result - if they
keep their head above water - they become "programmers" like that
rubbish Visual Basic generation we saw in the late 90's, early 2000's.
Writing horrific code because they actually don't have a clue what they
are doing.

Yeah, that sounds great!  [major sarcasm]

Start with the fundamentals, and maybe incite them every now and again
with the same example done in a GUI environment. Just enough to keep
them interested and excited in programming, but you have to get those
fundamentals down, otherwise they have no base to build on.

Regards,
  Graeme

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp