28%

Thats my student fail rate in 1st year basic C++ programming, I was hoping for lower but a couple of silly "lack of attention" fails put the rate up. Its not bad at all, better than last year apparently but I really wanted to get below 20%.

Still I'm quite sure most of those who failed will pass the re-take and go on to handle the rest of the year with ease.

I'm very very proud of my students (I don't think they read this :) but I'm sure they know), some of them were absolute beginners when they came to NHTV and have developed into really promising game programmers. A few in particular are going to be superstars if they don't get too big headed along the way ;)

I get the same bunch again later in the year for some more advanced programming and I hope to continue to see them improve and develop as they have done.

There's something quite magical about watching people you teach suddenly develop their own thinking processes and start to understand what they are doing. I call it a lightbulb moment, I'm quite convinced that once you get to that moment, your job is pretty much done and programming is very easy indeed and my role is just to push them to developing their thought processes and expose them to new ideas.

Of course getting to that lightbulb moment can take a while, and often they start out as 5w Bulbs, but it doesn't take long once that switch has flicked to see a full 100W shining away.

You can't buy the sense of achievement you get when you have a class of 100W bulbs sitting in front of you all starting to believe they know more than you.
Then watch them lap up everything you throw at them as you desperately try to prove you still know a tiny bit more than them.

I love this job.





Ahthankyew