Examining the First Year Three-Contact Hour Seminar. Implications for Faculty Development

It didnБЂ™t even process the remainder of the program. It was something like three months to run your first program. I learned then, instead of sending one program you had to develop every single subroutine in parallel and send the lot. I think I wrote a little program to display a chess boardБЂ”it would plot a chess board on the printer. But I had to write all the subroutines as parallel tasks because the turnaround time was so appallingly bad. Seibel: So you would write a subroutine with, basically, a unit test so you would see that it had, in fact, run? Armstrong: Yes. And then youБЂ™d put it all together. I donБЂ™t know if that counts as learning programming. When I went to university I was in the physics department at University College of London. I think we probably had programming from the first year. Then you had this turnaround of three hours or something. But again it was best to run about four or five programs at the same time so you got them back fairly quickly. Seibel: In high school, was it an actual school course? Armstrong: It was an after-hours courseБЂ”computer club or something ...»