My reaction to this paper was that I definitely like the idea that it espouses. To be able to learn how to design well, it is important to see a variety of designs, and try to tackle a problem in different ways.

A brief digression

In the Cog Sci course I am taking this semester, one thing we have been studying recently is how language is learned. There are two methods of presentation of material: "text" and "informant" presentation. A text presentation consists of only positive knowledge. So, in the example of language, a text presentation would be explaining to someone what sentences are in a language. An informant presentation contains both positive and negative knowledge. So, this presentation would describe what sentences are in a language, and what sentences are not in a language. It turns out that you are much more limited in what you can learn with only positive information.

So, bringing this back to discussing computer science, I think that for many areas, especially design, it would be good to focus on more negative information. It is very difficult to differentiate between a good design and a bad design if you are only presented with good designs. I think this is one way that TAing is very educational: you get a chance to see many ways of doing something, some of which are quite bad.

I bring up this topic because I think it is very similar to the ideal behind this paper. By giving students a greater variety in examples, it allows them to compare them, and learn what the positives and negatives are of various decisions.

This is why I really like the idea of letting people go down the wrong path without correction for a little while, so they can see that they can make a mistake, and hopefully figure out what went wrong. The TA's purpose then is to help explain how the mistake occured, and offer minimal suggestions to correct those. Thus the primary learning is still based on the students figuring out for themselves what's needed, rather than learning through osmosis.

So, then what are the best ways to allow students to go down the wrong paths? Should we give out different types of information and allow people to look at all and then decide? I definitely agree with this idea but i am curious about how it could be directly applied.