These would be the same topics they’ve already made videos about before
I don’t know if its just me but I find Delphi related Youtube videos some of the most painful content to watch on the internet and I’m not convinced any upcoming developers are going to be inspired with the current presentation method.
Main target is students and beginners but there are a few topics of possible interest to all, e.g. “Functional Programming and Anonymous Methods in Delphi”.
Since it’s aimed at beginners, you’d think that would be the perfect time to introduce unit testing… But unit testing isn’t “Fast Code”, so of course it isn’t included.
The target audience goes as low as 16 and so will not necessarily have much programming experience. Teaching testing in a structured way is important but some hooks are needed to get beginners interested, testing is not one of them. Seymour Papert has said a lot about this. A competitor in the education market took Seymour Papert’s ideas and developed Greenfoot which is based on Java. The two key ideas are
A creative experience
A way of sharing the software artefact with the community
Greenfoot has a bigger education market share in this age range than Delphi. Its university version is BlueJ. It is very successful at teaching the fundamentals of OOP at both levels. Later, students go on to use strategies such as Test Driven Design and Development and unit testing when they engage in software engineering. Testing is an integral part of the Greenfoot approach and similarly with Delphi in schools but it is formalised once students have some experience with the basics. Some scaffolding needs to be in place first. Courses in schools focus on education not training. If the beginner is a beginner in the language but has some experience with other languages then there is a case for demonstrating how unit testing can be done in Delphi. However, it is a smallish step to find this information and use it. I included a chapter in my book. The consensus was that the focus should be on getting more people to program in Delphi and the best place to begin is with schools and students in this age range. I have some experience with university CS education and I know how this works. This is a bigger challenge. I also have a lot of experience with school-level education and what works and what doesn’t work. But I also accept that there are differing views - I have read enough research papers covering this area and attended enough conferences to be aware of the language wars, the various approaches, etc.
Sorry to disagree with you. Will happily follow up with you and others in the group on how to address the disappearance of Delphi from schools in many countries that did at one time strongly support Delphi, Delphi/Pascal from the various Informatics Olympiads, the threat to the use of Delphi in schools in other countries. I also see a decline in memberships of Delphi User Groups around the world. I am also a member of the UK Delphi Developers’ Group. The decline in numbers has happened with this group as well.
The world-wide decline in CS undergraduates has been reversed by the Rebooting CS initiative, so it can be done but not with a piecemeal approach - a lot of ducks need to be lined up. Embarcadero, to its credit, has begun to get something credible together with LearnDelphi.org. Alister Christie is doing a fantastic job. A group of school teachers in South Africa are also making a valuable contribution and need the Delphi community’s support. The success of the Rebooting CS initiative was a lot of grassroots effort in various countries around the world. I was an active participant in the UK’s highly successful Computing At School group which managed to get £82,000,000 of support from the UK government and a lot of support from various companies. The group changed the National Curriculum for Computing in the home nations. Other members set up the Raspberry Pi foundation which now funds a lot of Computing education initiatives and research in the UK.
I am sure that something could be done to commission accessible materials to teach Test-DrivenDevelopment in the context of project working, appropriately scaffolded to cover the required prior knowledge and experience, for a specific age-range of education. In the UK, project work is not undertaken until about a third of the way into a two-year course because students do not have the required prior knowledge and experience.
