teaching machines

Funeral of Trite Ideas

February 24, 2019 by Chris Johnson. Filed under pop computer science, public.

The art teacher at my son’s elementary school once held a special ceremony called the Funeral of Trite Ideas. My son and his classmates said goodbye to some friends that they had known for years in their drawings: stick figures, flat outlines of cars, suns with smiling faces.

I am considering holding my own Funeral of Trite Ideas to bury some friends from our introductory computer science courses. Here are the friends I will invite:

• Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion
• The Animal hierarchy used to introduce inheritance, and maybe his buddies Shape, Vehicle, and Employee
• Letter grade calculation used to introduce conditionals
• The Towers of Hanoi problem used to introduce recursion

Some of these friends are reasonable computations but are just overdone. Others are too contrived and don’t adequately illustrate the computational need.

Let me know if I should invite anybody else.