> they fail because they can't figure out which functions they need to write to make a ball dance across the screen. It's not like the community agrees on thos

> they fail because they can't figure out which functions they need to write to make a ball dance across the screen. It's not like the community agrees on those functions, either. Problem division methodology varies across paradigms, communities, and individuals. Teaching CS is hard because you have to pretend, for a while, that there's one way to do it, and get to alternative representations later. Like in dynamics how they always start off teaching the Newtonian formulation, and only add Lagrangian and Hamiltonian later. Related to this is the possibly substantial tooling problem a student can get into left to her own choices: a teacher's other big contribution is synthetically (but usefully) limiting your options. (Which gives me an idea for a programming environment which only lets you use features you've demonstrated you understand. You demonstrate understanding by writing tests that reach 100% of some characteristic code, as measured by a code-coverage tool...)