How to design service courses | Gas station without pumps

I appreciate “Gas station without pumps” recent blog post on how to design service courses.  I strongly agree with the emphasis on giving students skills to do useful things now.  The greatest need for computing education is in the courses for non-CS majors.

It is never enough, even in a course for majors, to design the course around “they’ll need this later”.  It is far better to make them want to know it now, for things that they can do now.  For the Applied Circuits course, I concentrated ton the students doing design and construction in the labs, with just enough theory to do the design.  This is a big contrast to the traditional circuits course, which is all theory and math which EE students will use “later”—totally useless if the students then never take another EE course.

via Service courses | Gas station without pumps.