whitch school

You want to take other subjects if you want to be a better programmer and more importantly a game designer. Take lots of arts, study literature. Physics is very useful, chem and bio not so much but still should take a little if they are optional.

Take business classes as well.

Why? It makes you more rounded, gives you more ideas to draw on. Also if half way through school you decide that you don't actually like programming as much as you thought you did, maybe you'll have figured out that you love history, or physics, or some random subject that you wouldn't get in a trade school.

I would choose 1. If you truly want to be a great programmer you should expand you mindset, you should learn how nature does things, how to think about different problems, different approaches, how the world works, etc. If you have been paying attention to this forum you have probably noticed how people advocate languages like LISP (Scheme or Common LISP), Haskell, Oz, OCaml (F# sometimes), Prolog, etc. because they will help the programmer become better even though he might continue working with a C++ codebase. For the exact same reason I suggest you take option 1, it will probably help you to be a much better programmer than if you self-studied in your free-time.

You also say that 1 is one of the best schools so why not take advantage of that? If you want to get into a very good university after this then 1 would probably also look better. It sounds as if 1 will challenge you academically and teach you lots of stuff.

About a year ago I had to make a pretty similar choice myself. My grade was good enough to get in practically wherever I wanted, but I choose a high school with focus on technology (that means no art, serious litteratur and only one foreign language (English)) because I knew I was that computer geek who would go on to study SE or CS at university and eventually be hired by a game programming company. Now, a year later, I'm not so sure. I have realized that other subjects can be very interresting too, but they would just be so much more fun in an envirornment with truly inspiring teachers and classmates who also felt the subjects were interesting. Also game programming doesn't look like what I want to do for a living anymore even though I was completely sure of that for 3 years.

EDIT: I tried taking a look at the CS/EE courses for which MIT has freely available online content (lecture notes, readings and in some cases videos of the lectures). Among them were the following:
Electromagnetics and Applications
Quantitative Physiology: Cells and Tissues
Quantitative Physiology: Organ Transport Systems
Bioinformatics and Proteomics
Computational Biology: Genomes, Networks, Evolution
Algorithms for Computational Biology
Fundamentals of Photonics: Quantum Electronics
Micro/Nano Processing Technology
Modern Optics Project Laboratory
Engineering Biomedical Information: From Bioinformatics to Biosurveillance
Medical Computing
Medical Decision Support
Computational Functional Genomics
Computational Evolutionary Biology
Classical Mechanics: A Computational Approach
Organic Optoelectronics
I know CS isn't exactly the same as programming, but it shows that even elite universities like MIT find it worthwile to encourage their students to take classes in biology and physics even though the main focus is computer science.

[Edited by - CTar on May 13, 2007 2:05:55 PM]

I agree, definitely pick #1. If you get a degree/education that focuses on computer science but covers a broad range of topics, it is seen as a better, more well-rounded education than a trade school that just tells you how to program. Also, the programming part will teach you more in depth, helping you understand what's going on at a deeper, more fundamental level, while a trade school would just teach you languages and technologies.

That's how it works in the U.S., at least; a degree from a good college that gives a broader education is seen as much better than a degree from a trade school. Often, companies hire people from trade school for jobs that require little in-depth knowledge, simple jobs that pay much less money. For jobs that are more complicated and challenging, they hire people from a full college, and the college graduates are often paid much more than trade school graduates.

Quote:

Original post by lulul since i want to be a programmer, why i should teach chemic, biology and such things :X

If you only want to be a programmer, you should only learn how to program. If you want to be an intelligent, learned person, you need more than that.

I'd take 1 as well. I never regretted taking those philosophy, music, and history classes. There's more to life than programming, and sometimes those seemingly-unrelated fields can provide good inspiration for programming.

thanks for all your replies. today a sign-up paper arrived to me. i will choose #1 :p