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How Mrs. Eija Vieri-Gashi ended up teaching computer programmingMrs. Eija Vieri-Gashi was a teacher and my colleague at the School of Engineering in the Oulu University of Applied Sciences in Finland. During many years, she had been teaching courses related to the basic phenomena of electricity and electronics. The students at our institute liked Eija very much, and she was once selected the best teacher at our university.Like me, Eija has studied at the Department of Electrical Engineering in the University of Oulu. Unlike me, she did not want to concentrate on computers and computer programming in her studies. She told me that she found computers and the programming courses rather confusing and frightening, and therefore she concentrated on other areas of electrical engineering. When my book A Natural Introduction to Computer Programming with C++ was published in 2003, Eija decided to buy the book because she felt that she knew too little about computer programming. During that year, Eija had free time, and she started to read the book systematically from the beginning. What happened was that she started to understand things. Those confusing and frightening computers started to behave like manageable devices in her mind. What happened ultimately was that she got so excited about the subject that she wanted to start giving basic courses about computer programming. Thus we now have an excellent new teacher in this field. Unfortunately Eija no longer works at our school. I think there are many
clever people who could understand how computers operate, and who could
learn to write computer programs, but somehow these people are prevented
from entering the "world of computers". For this reason, I have tried to
write books which reveal the secrets of the computer world in a natural
and easy-to-read manner. The story of Mrs. Eija Vieri-Gashi indicates that
I might have succeeded in this work.
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