10 PRINT “CODING IS OVERRATED” 20 GOTO 10
I remember when I taught in Houston back in the early 1990s and felt it was a crime that my school did not offer any real computer programming course. The best they had was something called ‘computer applications’ where students would spend the semester mastering things like Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. I felt that students were being shortchanged by not getting the opportunity to program since this was something that I learned back when I was in 8th grade and which my own junior high school taught everyone in 9th grade.
Programming a computer is a great hands on experience where a class is, by its nature, student centered. I remember my 9th grade computer class where we programmed challenges in BASIC on our Atari 800 computers. My friend Jared and I were the superstars in the class and racked up many stickers on the wall chart that tracked individual progress through the challenges. I remember one challenge that vexed me for a while: the goal was to get a bunch of text like “hello, how are you?” and to have to computer take the letters and put them in alphabetical order, but to keep the spaces and the punctuation intact, so the output would be “aeehh, llo oor uwy?”
After my fifth year of teaching, many people don’t know this about me, I went back to school for my ‘real’ career in computer science. I got a master’s degree in comp sci and worked for several years as a programmer. I was decent at it and became of of the better ‘debuggers’ for, at the time, a very well selling desktop publishing program called Quark XPress. But staring at a
