I'm not a good comment writer so here's some text:
Not a teacher, but Python is great to discover various aspects of programming (algorithmic, flow control, I/O, OOP, metaprogramming). It's also easy to setup.
Java is just painful. The environment setup and the various frameworks available there are just way too overwhelming.
JS is actually close to Python in my opinion, and better suited for getting introduced to functional programming while still using a non-functional language. See anonymous functions/arrow functions. APIs are heavily callback-oriented which is also a great thing to get used to: You can register a bit of computation (a function) to be executed some other time, i.e. when something happens. You are not in control of the execution of that function, someone else is and will call you back. This is something important to learn (imo).
Finding the optimum algorithm is not important in the beginning (imo). When writing code there's often two pretty different activities that happen:
Defining and organizing your abstractions and flow.
Identify bottlenecks and search for fast enough/memory efficient solutions.
In most real world scenarios, having good program flow and abstractions will be enough. Not everyone works on real-time terabyte-sized data processing. See gamemaking: it's a very performance sensitive domain yet frameworks allow anyone to make a decent game. Why? Because for most problems, someone already wrote a library that's fast enough. You just need to wire things properly together.
Teaching something lower-level like C/C++ is great, but you need to spend time deconstructing all the goodies people got used too when dealing with other languages. i.e. Why you can't create an array with different types/structs inside anymore (not without pointers).
And then just get them to practice writing different bits of software with increasing complexity, over the year(s). The most exposure to writing code the better. Trial and error is how anything is learned, and while you might try to warn your students about common pitfalls it might only really click once they'll make the mistake. Push them in situations where they'll make mistakes.
The most important mindset to have (imo) is to constantly challenge yourself and your work: find ways to break your own stuff. Maybe you'll miss cases but the better you get at anticipating breakage, the better you'll get at writing robust software.
The second most important thing is to seek to understand every line of code you write and as many implications as possible. A program is supposed to be deterministic, there's very few surprises to be had when dealing with code (there are some though). What I mean by that is: if someone reports a bug, it can often be enough to read the code with the unexpected result in mind and work your way back to the places that allowed for this bug to occur, just by reading statically.
Lastly one thing that was motivating for me when learning programming was when our programs would run against one another. Competition fosters innovation.
I hope these pieces of opinion help with anything...
Weapon balance is completely broken, depending on what you use you'll go from losing every 1v1 to winning them all: BAS-B is the current broken battle rifle.
Then you have people learning maps by heart and prefiring corners, maybe they heard you, maybe there was a UAV, don't overthink it.
You're completely right that people turned a blind eye to what the Nazis were doing for as long as they could. But once shit hit the fan the Holocaust was no null part of why people kept fighting while protecting the jewish people that were unfortunate enough to live in their region. The main goal was liberating themselves from the occupation, but what the Nazis were trying to do just made it so much more important to gain control back from these monsters.
Having a european perspective on the way this part of history is told I took the following phases away:
Allied nations tried their best to avoid confrontation.
Nazis attacked and WW2 began.
The Allied lost more and more territory.
Inside these occupied territories people did the following things:
Fight to liberate themselves.
Otherwise fight undercover to hide and protect jewish people living in their region.
So while the main reason was to gain sovereignty back, the Holocaust heavily contributed to people fighting back at all costs. Witnessing such atrocities marked europeans really hard, and teachings of this story try to emphasis the scale of the horrors that the Nazis were inflicting to occupied places. It's documented, witnesses are still somewhat around to tell what they've seen and if not their testimony was properly shared with later generations.
All that to say that while WW2 was fought over protecting sovereignty, it became more than that once people ended up as the first witnesses of the ongoing genocide.
Now I have to say that I have no idea what's a north-american perspective on that matter.
How is lab grown meat change for the sake of change? There's obvious benefits to it: no more need to breed beings just to eat them, less resource-intensive, frees up land, and I might be missing others
The burnout aspect comes in the form of wanting to eject yourself when trying to do anything creative. It's a difficult place to be in. Trying to force through just adds more strain and honestly doesn't make anything better. Finding the causes for the burnout and addressing them is more effective from my experience.
I'm not a good comment writer so here's some text:
Not a teacher, but Python is great to discover various aspects of programming (algorithmic, flow control, I/O, OOP, metaprogramming). It's also easy to setup.
Java is just painful. The environment setup and the various frameworks available there are just way too overwhelming.
JS is actually close to Python in my opinion, and better suited for getting introduced to functional programming while still using a non-functional language. See anonymous functions/arrow functions. APIs are heavily callback-oriented which is also a great thing to get used to: You can register a bit of computation (a function) to be executed some other time, i.e. when something happens. You are not in control of the execution of that function, someone else is and will call you back. This is something important to learn (imo).
Finding the optimum algorithm is not important in the beginning (imo). When writing code there's often two pretty different activities that happen:
In most real world scenarios, having good program flow and abstractions will be enough. Not everyone works on real-time terabyte-sized data processing. See gamemaking: it's a very performance sensitive domain yet frameworks allow anyone to make a decent game. Why? Because for most problems, someone already wrote a library that's fast enough. You just need to wire things properly together.
Teaching something lower-level like C/C++ is great, but you need to spend time deconstructing all the goodies people got used too when dealing with other languages. i.e. Why you can't create an array with different types/structs inside anymore (not without pointers).
And then just get them to practice writing different bits of software with increasing complexity, over the year(s). The most exposure to writing code the better. Trial and error is how anything is learned, and while you might try to warn your students about common pitfalls it might only really click once they'll make the mistake. Push them in situations where they'll make mistakes.
The most important mindset to have (imo) is to constantly challenge yourself and your work: find ways to break your own stuff. Maybe you'll miss cases but the better you get at anticipating breakage, the better you'll get at writing robust software.
The second most important thing is to seek to understand every line of code you write and as many implications as possible. A program is supposed to be deterministic, there's very few surprises to be had when dealing with code (there are some though). What I mean by that is: if someone reports a bug, it can often be enough to read the code with the unexpected result in mind and work your way back to the places that allowed for this bug to occur, just by reading statically.
Lastly one thing that was motivating for me when learning programming was when our programs would run against one another. Competition fosters innovation.
I hope these pieces of opinion help with anything...