I’m sad to see so much chest banging on the part of open source and free speech advocates over this issue on the likes of Ars Technica or Boing Boing.  Some people claim that his solutions are a great educational resource and that programmers learn most by looking at others’ work.  Of course we’ve all learned a lot from reading code, but we’ve most likely learned more by banging our heads against the wall when we were stuck on a difficult problem. When students can look up solutions for inspiration, they’re cheating themselves out of a learning opportunity. Having the code online, indexed by search engines is just too tempting, even for well-intentioned students.  Kyle himself claims he wants his code up for future employers.  I’d be very surprised if employers cared at all about code written in introductory courses to structured prompts.  What employers want to see are larger, creative projects — code that absolutely does belong online for collaboration, education, etc.  As is, the posted solutions have very little value to anyone but future cheaters.

It’s irritating, really, to read the discussions about instructors being lazy for not coming up with new assignments.  It’s extremely difficult to come up with compelling programming assignments, especially for early courses such as data structures/algorithms. Students need highly-structured practice on difficult concepts before they solve more open-ended problems.   An instructor can spend weeks coming up with an assignment that’s challenging, well-structured and well-scoped. One student posting their source code means that many others will use the solution as a guide, if not for blatant cheating. I guess the reaction to have is “they’ll get what they deserve on the test.”

This is bound to be more and more common as students spend more time online and become more tech-savvy at a younger age.  I hope I can have civilized conversations with students and make them understand that posting source code to structured assignments is not appropriate.  At the same time, I do think it’s important to find new and fun ways to encourage students to collaborate on and share larger, open-ended projects.

We did a bit of work with Scratch recently to debunk some programming misconceptions and work on spatial reasoning and problem analysis.

I’ve created a number of structured Scratch assignment writeups including one for the little tree program pictured below.  Since I haven’t really found any such resources (links appreciated!), I figured I’d share: Scratch assignments

Scratch program draws a tree of user-specified size

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