31 Jul 07 Hasil Test Aptitude Pemrograman Mhs tahun pertama di UK
Saeed Dehnadi dan Richard Bornat (paper pdf) melakukan sebuah tes apititude pemrograman:
Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause.
It has long been suspected that some people have a natural aptitude for programming, but until now there has been no psychological test which could detect it. Programming ability is not known to be correlated with age, with sex, or with educational attainment; nor has it been found to be correlated with any of the aptitudes measured in conventional intelligence or problem-solving-ability tests.
We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give details. We can predict success or failure even before students have had any contact with any programming language with very high accuracy, and by testing with the same instrument after a few weeks of exposure, with extreme accuracy. We present experimental evidence to support our claim. We point out that programming teaching is useless for those who are bound to fail and pointless for those who are certain to succeed.
Berdasarkan hasil pengujian mereka, terdapat tiga kelompok dalam kelas pemrograman,
- Kelompok yang ingin belajar lebih cepat
- Kelompok yang mengatur diri dan berusaha supaya lulus
- Kelompok yang belum memahami ide dasar pemrograman (sampai perkuliah selesai)
Tampaknya kesalahan bukan pada dosen (baik dari material maupun cara mengajarnya):
The cause isn’t to be found in inappropriate teaching materials or methods either. Essentially, the computer science community has tried everything (see section 2) and nothing works. Graphics, artificial intelligence, logic programming languages, OOP, C, C++, PROLOG, Miranda: you name it, we’ve tried it. We’ve tried conventional teaching, lab-based learning by discovery and remedial classes. We’ve tried enthusiasm and cold- eyed logical clarity. Nothing makes a difference. Even the UK’s attempt in the 1980s to teach the whole UK population to program on the BBC Micro ran into the sand.
Bagaimana dengan mahasiswa kita ????
30 Jul 07 Molecular Dynamics Simulations
Kurt Binder (Institute of Physics Mainz), Jurgen Horbach (Institute of Physics Mainz), Walter Kob (Laboratoire des Verres Montpellier), Wolfgang Paul (Institute of Physics Mainz), Fathollah Varnik (CECAM Lyon)
(Submitted on 7 Aug 2003)
Abstract: A tutorial introduction to the technique of Molecular Dynamics (MD) is given, and some characteristic examples of applications are described. The purpose and scope of these simulations and the relation to other simulation methods is discussed, and the basic MD algorithms are described. The sampling of intensive variables (temperature T, pressure p) in runs carried out in the microcanonical (NVE) ensemble (N= particle number, V = volume, E = energy) is discussed, as well as the realization of other ensembles (e.g. the NVT ensemble). For a typical application example, molten SiO2, the estimation of various transport coefficients (self-diffusion constants, viscosity, thermal conductivity) is discussed. As an example of Non-Equilibrium Molecular Dynamics (NEMD), a study of a glass-forming polymer melt under shear is mentioned.
