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Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

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Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#11

Post by rafael859 »

What prior knowledge does your student have?

In my experience, what helped me the most when starting to learn how to code was having a motivating problem that I wanted to solve. Why do I care what a for-loop is if I can't see how it is even helpful? Many tutorials have examples when teaching, but I believe that the problem should come first, and act as the glue between the basic ideas that will be introduced. Then, the mentor's most important role is to guide the student through best practices, such as style and performance.

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#12

Post by m4r »

I have little experience with teaching but here are my 2 cents: What I observed is that at some point any new developer grows in ego and starts to question. So it's better to absent from teaching and let your pupil do something incorrectly on their own - if they fail they will learn a lot more than when being instructed to do something properly right from the start.

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#13

Post by codr7 »

Real teaching is exploring, discovering, inspiring, reminding and pointing in the right direction. Not so much imposing a ready-made system of thought on others. It takes experience, and discipline to get to the point where this is possible without egos crashing the party one way or the other.

Someone said that finding good teachers is difficult, and that's true from my experience; but it 's a Sunday walk in the park compared to finding good students.

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#14

Post by BossingAround »

To teach programming is to take on the following roles:

1) Information provider - search for suitable materials. For example, if the student finds the materials not engaging, it would be your role to find different material that suits the needs of the student better

2) Problem provider - this is extremely important. It is difficult, for example, to care about loops when all the textbooks show only that--loops in isolation. Your role is to construct or find problems that the student can solve with their new knowledge. Generally, the challenges/issues should be one level above the student's knowledge, so that it pushes them forward.

3) Guidance role - it is your job to analyze the students' motivation behind learning how to code, and provide suitable path. E.g. if one wants to become a web designer, it might not be the most suitable to start with assembler. You should also course correct, e.g. when you see a web designer to be struggling with data structures, it is absolutely appropriate to make a detour into some CS territory with data structure classes.

But, of course, most of the learning does the student him or herself. You can't teach anyone anything ever. You can just be there for the student, to help them and guide them.

My 2c as a self-taught developer.

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#15

Post by moveax »

rafael859 wrote: post #11

What prior knowledge does your student have? In my experience, what helped me the most when starting to learn how to code was having a motivating problem that I wanted to solve. Why do I care what a for-loop is if I can't see how it is even helpful? Many tutorials have examples when teaching, but I believe that the problem should come first, and act as the glue between the basic ideas that will be introduced. Then, t…

His father is a coder too and he is making a specific IT school here. So he comes with basic knowledge about data structures, databases and how code is build.

Yeah, real world problems are what my favorite way to teach particular ways of building things. No one wants to build the 7th calculator.

Thanks for your Feedback!

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#16

Post by moveax »

tech2 wrote: post #9
din-9 wrote: post #2

Understanding that we all have different mental models, and that affects how we learn. Understanding my own vs my students' helped me to get them to understand what I was trying to communicate.

This in particular is massive. Some people like (and work well) pair programming, others want reading materials, others yet need videos. Just being there to answer questions or help when they have issues can be a tremendous assist since it means they're rarely left frustrated by being unable to move forward on their own.

Wow, thank you two. That's something i experienced before with my internships. One learned better while solving some atomized questions and the other one learned better in live coding sessions.

I am glad that i will start with only one Person here and i can focus on how he learns :)

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#18

Post by moveax »

nurettin wrote: post #7

I have seen classes full of disinterested kids learn by: 1. reading algorithm flows 2. following changes in variables for C code 3. drawing their own algorithms 4. implementing those in C. repeat for a whole semester. in the end, those who are really interested will pick up tooling and go ahead by themselves.

I am lucky that he already have those coding basics and wants to learn. And i experienced in his intership that he came back the other day and said "i tried this at home, how could i do this better" and was all open for suggestions ect

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#19

Post by moveax »

cammil wrote: post #10

It depends on the student. Don't make assumptions. Observe and test them frequently. How you should teach them will be driven by this, and nothing else. Btw, I ran a tutoring company for 8 years with over 6k tutors.

Awesome. Yeah i can not assume that everyone is an autodidact and teaches himself.

I will follow your suggestion.

Well, over 6k tutors sounds like you found ways to guide people successfully through the process.

My Question about this is, was peer-programming a standard tool, or just plain code-reviews?

Re: Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

#20

Post by moveax »

temp99990 wrote: post #5

I’m in a well known bootcamp in SF right now (after flirting with idea for a few years and finally making the timing work). Having hit the half way point, I would say the day-to-day format has been very conducive to learning, at least for me. Basic structure is: -nightly readings and videos on a new concept -a homework on the readings -a quiz on the material Next day: -a half day lecture on the new material from the…

I never experienced a coding camp (and i don't know if this is a thing here in Europe).

But that sounds reasonable and i just made a note about this for my plannings.

Thanks for your insights.

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