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The biggest value I received in my undergraduate courses was from the classes where I built large projects. Building a compiler from scratch, piece by awful pie
by matthewdgreen 1y ago
The biggest value I received in my undergraduate courses was from the classes where I built large projects. Building a compiler from scratch, piece by awful piece. Implementing a ray tracer, from splines to shaders. Even if I don't use compilers or graphics in my day-to-day work, it was my experience of building those larger-scale systems and working through the problems that benefited me.
As a teacher I just don't know how to replicate that experience in a world where half will skip the work, and all I'm able to do is a two-hour sanity check that they learned some concepts. How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"?
- amy214 1y ago>How do I test for "the experience you developed spending four hours making that register allocator behave properly, to the point where you're intimately familiar with every failure mode"? ask them to list and describe failure modes on your exam.
- matthewdgreen 1y agoThey’ll ask someone else to share a list. It won’t mean anything. To give an analogy: imagine we taught new drivers to drive from lectures and a written exam, without ever requiring them to log any hours in a car. It doesn’t work there, and it doesn’t work well anywhere else.