14 3 / 2010
Training newbies : How a whole corporation may forget to go through simple things
Hello,
As you may know, I’ve been a trainer in a well-known IT school in France. I’m now back in it as a student, and although I’ve been mainly teaching Linux Technologies, I’m still really interested in everything that’s related to training.
That’s when a student who’s a freshman told me something : in their C class they were asked to display a rotating cube in SDL. Ok, that may seem a classic to most of us, experienced developers, but that’s where the problem is.
The fact is, they had no course on SDL, and although there are several resources about it online, they are only in their first year, most of them had little to no-knowledge about programming before, and they are French people (meaning that English is not their native language with all the problem that can cause, especially to people not already really familiar with our vocabulary).
By the way, on top of the difficulties related to the SDL, there are the difficulties related to the mathematics.
We have forgotten that all these layers, that are of little difficulty on their own (each one), when added, represent a big difficulty for newbies.
So, I suggest that we should add a step, a step that’s pretty natural because let’s remember something : years before the apparition of 3D Games, we had 2D Games, and 2D is far easier to manage because most people interested in computers are used to working on a screen which is 2D, also, they are generally just out from High-School where you do work in 2D most of the time.
Also, it’s way easier for the mind to think in 2D (just because that’s one variable less and also because it allows to forget about the project problem).
So, what’s a good exercise, providing all the difficulties (such as managing rotations with some trigonometry) while avoiding 3D?
It’s simple and that’s an application we’re all used to see : a clock!
With a clock, you have to draw and you also have to manage rotations. So, that’s a good idea.
That was just a thought that I wanted to share.
See you soon!
Note : Here, I use the word “newbie” just in the sense of “new-comers”, nothing negative as it is sometimes implied on the Web.
