The Practice is not the Performance: Why project-based learning fails

Programming can be creative but it is not performance art. I'm not sure what you were expecting? Even if you found something (subjective) it may not be very functional. Completely different animal. You seemed to be missing the point of software engineering.

Funny you choose Horowitz, Monk, Starvinsky and Cage as examples. Which either never attended, rejected or had limited academic education.

Completely unsupported, in fact.

Of course no foreign part-timer can speak French like a native, but able students can certainly hold a basic conversation and read French to a reasonable level.

Language degrees include an exchange program which offers extended full immersion, so it's simply nonsense to say that a graduate in French won't be able to speak it.

But... the problem with CS is that it has no idea what it is. Most engineering degrees have well-formed requirements, which include a lot of math and domain-specific detail.

The sciences and math have a core curriculum which hasn't really changed all that much for fifty years or so now.

CS has... what? What's the basic skill set, what are the core requirements, and how are they recognised?

No one agrees. Employers mostly want "Minimum Viable Developers" who can crank out code using the Framework du Jour.

Academics do what academics do.

You can certainly make the case for any one specific curriculum, which will include a mix of theory and programming projects in various languages and environments.

But there's really no such thing as a definitive core CS skill set. For everyone who says "You should know C" someone else is going to say "Bad example - learn this teaching language instead."

And so it goes for the rest. Machine code? Compiler theory? DSP? It's all optional.

At the same time, CS has spent far too little time on the psychology of programming and system design. There's a fair amount of unicorn chasing, in the form of tidy concepts like type theory and side-effect free coding, but far too little research into designing languages and practices that are verifiably better at managing concurrency, handling versioning, and minimising avoidable bugs.

So the "learn theory vs learn by practice" question is a side issue, and can't be answered unless there are specific goals. For now, there's no such thing as a "qualified developer" in the sense that there are qualified (actually chartered) engineers.

Until there is, how can anyone decide which teaching approach is better when there's limited agreement about what needs to be taught?

Actually, software engineering isn't a completely different animal from music-ing. It's the most similar animal I can think of. Its pedagogy is behind music's pedagogy by two, maybe three hundred years. (for obvious reasons) It could learn a lot from the errors in music pedagogy. For one example I can think of off the top of my head, the OP mentioned that we practice scales. Well, yes. But it really is "how" we practice scales that matters. Practicing a scale from bottom to top and back isn't really useful. But lots of people do it like crazy. They drill this. But nowhere in music (maybe performance art, though?)is there a scale in any key all the way up in four ocatves and all the way back down. Nowhere. So practicing that is really a waste of time. It isn't a waste of time if you want to just learn how to play anything fast though, because you "know those notes". Playing fast is a different physical feeling that is counter-intuitive really. But people practice scales like this for the key's sake, and that is really not a great use of practice time. A better use, in this analogy, would be if you wanted to see if you could get around a key in any direction, with leaps and figures and all the things that may show up in a key. Then practice that. Practice figures, loops, improv leaps- in a key. That will make you a better sightreader a better player in that key way faster than scales. I I have the data for hundreds of students, myself and colleagues to prove it. This information doesn't get to the regular Saturday student, but believe me, it is known by professionals and great teachers. It isn't unconventional at all, despite the many parents who get worried about their kids not playing scales like they did or like they heard in movies or TV commercials. Mozart practiced like this. Paganini practiced like this. I have to make the argument to concerned parents at least once a year anyhow. Not sure why. I'm not saying drilling isn't important. It is. But it's what to drill that is the thing. It is also not churning out a bunch of meat compilers and calling those musicians-- or programmers. One thing programmers cold drill right off the bat would be typing for programming. I see a lot of bad typing. I'm bad at it. I realize that's a basic idea. Programming is creative in exactly the way that playing the blues is creative. Everybody does it differently- those who develop their own style are the greats, but in the end, it is still blues. Not sure why academic education of those composers has anything to do with anything. Certainly those composers were some of the most educated, intellectual people who have lived, Monk being the least traditional in his expertise, but he sure understood social history. And even he headed over to work with Hal Overton when he wanted some respect from the establishment at Juilliard and for his Town Hall concert. My point being, in current educational models for programming (not talking MIT or Stanford, because I woldn't know and I'm sure it's different there, because they really pay for it to be so) we aren't reaching for great teaching. We aren't reaching for inspiration. We aren't reaching for technical innovation. But there is a whole lot we can learn from master teachers who have come before in other fields. I think the OP has a point, but I think project-based learning is very important. NOT, however at the exclusion of drills that are creative. Not at the exclusion of coming up with techniques that other fields have not thought of yet. I mean- sheesh- we have accessible mountains of teaching/learning data in computing. No one is using that to make their education better. Why?

There’s simply a huge range of PhD programs out there - I think that makes such a broad conclusion difficult to conclusively assert. Some concrete examples which spring to mind:

- A PhD in Performance from the University of Indiana - A PhD in any technical field, from say, MIT - A PhD in comparative literature from Yale - A PhD in clinical psychology (which could be therapy-focused or research-focused), further subdividing it) from UC Berkeley - A PhD in EE/CS from Berkeley.

I have no doubt all of those PhDs will be able to do a lot. I have no doubt that some, but not all, of what said PhDs can do will be valued by employers. And that is why academia and scholarship are distinct from business and industry - they have different, but sometimes overlapping, aims. And a PhD is explicitly training to be a scholar/researcher - it’s not a professional degree, though it sometimes has value in a professional environment.

Project based learning is not inherently better at teaching a given subject. But it's a superior method for teaching how to write computer software because it's an opportunity to motivate, train, discuss and drill on core software developer tools.

#1 problem with folks out of college? They have no idea how to start or maintain a basic workflow. Project based learning provides space for this.