I believe in helping to steer the minds of students into the correct direction provided they are using their minds to get there.

However, this has not often been the case. Awhile back I was helping someone with a project to program the old electronic game SIMON(?) where you press buttons in a progressively revealed sequence to challenge your memory. This ended up being a bad experience for one who contributes assistance. Whether the person was a real student in need of a LOT of help or someone having a little fun at an engineers expense doesn't really matter, it illustrates the problems of getting too entangled in assisting.

I started off by explaining concepts, then wrote some example modules. The student didn't appear to figure anything out. I mentioned the need to debounce the keys (though I wrote an inferred debounce control flow) and I was told that he showed the code to his teacher and his teacher said he'd never heard of debounce and that the code was unnecessarily complex. DUH! The teacher didn't even know how to write WORKING code. So even being an expert, you can find yourself doubted by the unknowledgable. I finally just wrote the whole code and sent it and said that's the last I'm contributing. I got an email saying he couldn't compile it (he didn't know basic compiler directives) and that was the last I got involved. But it didn't end there... for a year I got a bunch of dumb emails as he sent jokes and chain letters to all his friends in his email accounts. After requesting he remove me from his email list and his replies that he didn't know how... I spammed him to death. Its been quiet for about two months now.

My suggestion, offer a little assistance and then let the Darwinian Principle determine who will and who will not be future engineers.

:)

-aka j, the social darwinist