Teach people how to google properly.

May sound a bit sarcastic but I think an important part is how to look for errors on your own rather than going to the professor/TA. I’ve seen people paste in whole error logs or more often “code throws error, what do?”

At least teach in classes what to look out for like what error type in java and understanding how to look at stackoverflow questions to apply their solution to your issue.

Moral of the story: teach people how to use existing knowledge rather than just depend on someone to help their exact issue.

Not sarcastic at all. Most of how I learned to code was knowing how to ask Google. Stack Overflow and other sites helped out the rest. You need to use what you know to think about exactly what you’re asking. I watched my elementary school teacher type in “ball won’t stop spinning” into Google once because the computer kept freezing and the cursor was doing the loading animation.

@GMR516 ahahaha... ball won’t stop spinning.. @nikmanG exactly! most people don't know how to ask. Some of the solutions can even be found on the error message.

Couldn’t agree more. But honestly it’s also about intelligence. People sometimes google the most specific stuff, like a particular error with word by word error message in tow. You gotta open up a bit and connect the dots afterwards from the results of simplistic errors.

Most of the time I’m able to figure it out after seeing 2-3 other similar problems and combing their solutions to a new 4th one.

@ghostpos that’s sort of the thing. Some people are either to vague (why is the ball still spinning) or too precise (NullPointer in line:42 of file C:/Program Files/Projects/What_The_Hell_Is_This). Need to know how to cut out the fluff. May sound funny I someone comes up and says “today we are learning how to google/search stackoverflow” but I think it would be beneficial.

Bud what if they find out about google dorks? Then we can't have hundreds of vulnerable websites accessible through Google anymore... XD

I'm from Italy and when I did university the biggest problems I saw (other than people having no real passion for programming) is that some people lack the basics:

- They can't type fast
- They try to solve problems looking at other exercises they did instead of thinking
- They don't know how to use a PC in general (I'm talking about copy&paste with keyboard)

School is broken from the ground, sometimes it goes beyond the way knowledge is taught, which was also bad in the schools I did.

If you want to change education you need to make people think about how to solve a problem by thinking with the tools they have instead of giving the same type of exercises every exam, the only thing you archive is students memory studying every exams and trying to find similarities between them