Always Something New to Teach

I was chatting with a friend of mine who teaches the game programming courses at the local university.  I asked him what I could do to help my students succeed in his program if they wanted to go that direction.  He said they should be familiar with programming and the rest he can teach them.  Familiarity with Unity is a big plus also.  I was curious what his idea of “familiar with programming” meant.  I teach a Python course so I wanted to be sure I was going the right direction.  For his courses he said any language that is object oriented (OOP).  His suggestions were Java or C#.  What was interesting was he said the student should have an idea where they want to go academically.  For his direction an OOP language is best, for most of the other sciences, Python.  Yes, I know, Python can be OOP but apparently that is not its strong point.  I do not know OOP so I cannot talk too much about Python and OOP.  So I need to look at learning how to program using OOP.  Since Unity uses C# I guess it is predetermined.  Now I just have to find a book or set of lessons that can teach an old man new tricks.  I have tried to learn OOP before but many years of hacking with procedural programming has made it very difficult to pick up.  I usually think that OOP is a mess and my old technique works and I end up bailing on the attempt.  I am not going to teach this (if I do) until next fall so I have a while to warmed up.

One Response to “Always Something New to Teach”

  1. gasstationwithoutpumps Says:

    Python is great for teaching object-oriented programming, if you create classes to do everything. Everything in Python is already an object (even simple things like numbers).

    What Python is not good at is static type checking, which is a very different concept from object-oriented programming, though some people who teach Java, C++, or C# conflate the concepts.

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