I do not want to argue about the university programming language education here, but I have to say personally I don?¡¥t think this education is so successful in higher education recently. Programming is not knowledge that can be passively given in a classroom with one chalk. And it can not be apprehended by finishing those practice exercises. Programming has its unique characters, new, practical, changeable, unanswerable, and multi-approachable. Even other traditional education has showed its excellence in classroom teaching; this may not be applied to programming education. There are three reasons that traditional classroom teaching is not the best candidate for the programming education. On the other hand, it might lead to a surface learning. Firstly, the course style teaching usually provides student a heavy workload. Because of such an excessive amount of course material, it appears to be a lack of opportunity to pursue learning in depth. Students seem to start to cram all knowledge provided during term time without real thinking, analyzing, and processing knowledge. Secondly, this teaching gives small choices over methods of learning. Students usually note down what the teacher said in the classroom, go to practice room to type the sample programs out, and hand in the coursework. But the programming can not be normally learnt just by some PowerPoint files and practice problems. It asks more to conquer it, like logic thinking during handling huge amount of variables in programs. Thirdly, there is always a threatening and anxiety provoked by assessment system. In this context, students are always trying to learn how to prove that they have learnt instead of real learning.
