Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

For beginners, programs that output graphics are motivating. I have developed a browser-based programming language and environment that makes this easy.

https://easyprog.online

I'll refer to the talk [0] from last congress about the german sibling of the high-school version of MIT's How to Design Programms [1]. It's about teaching a functional-first style of abstraction with a _very_ rigorous structured approach to writing the design. I wish I'd started with HtDP instead of Pascal/Delphi (later Java), but it's the best approach I see if one wants to quickly be able to start a project of non-trivial complexity without it ending in a horror show of technical debt and/or frustrating bugs one doesn't even know how to analyze/tackle. If a slightly above average (1-2 sigma IQ, aka 120+-10) 6th grader isn't scared of the complexity, it should be possible to rely on the urge of curiosity to get said child to continue being teached by oneself. While I applaud the use of Racket for this teaching, it unfortunately scares off many who believe that companies prefer code-monkeys who can hack stuff together within Python's ecosystem. I know that, with some connections, it's easy to start with these functional skills in a company that has tasks that are suited for this approach, as well as senior engineers with some functional skills (enough to grasp what the new hire created). A good manager can let someone with no industry experience work on a well-defined component that takes 1~3 weeks to design and implement, with next to no micro-management. It only works though if the new hire is skilled in designing software, which HtDP has as it's main goal (it's even in the title). I'd hire a newbie self-taught with HtDP after testing stochastically to verify that he/she actually worked and understood all of it with just one 1~4 day in-office real-world task to test if the learned things compose into actual wholesome software design skills. I'd not like one who learned Python on his/her own and now has 1.5 years full-time experience designing&coding Python. Not without some specific testing to judge the quality of their design skills, which btw. is a far harder test than randomly sampling concepts of HtDP with short excercises similar to those in the book itself, followed by the mentioned few-day practice test. HtDP gives me the confidence to assume these few-day results scale to projects that take months, after just about .5~1 year of experience with projects that take a few days to weeks each.

[0] https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9800-how_to_teach_programming_to... [1] https://htdp.org

I am trying to self-learn to code from a quite some time now, couple of years to be exact.

Can't really tell objectively how is my process going because my end goal is to be able to sit down imagine a thing a code it, not even close.

I get some concepts a lot better because I am constantly going back to the basics and start over, but still I struggle on low-level real world examples or mid-level problems from websites like codewars and etc.

Here is my advice to you. Make real world examples. What I mean by that, don't make a tutorial how to do a calculator or a weather app or something like that.

Instead, after each new concept or lesson that you make introducing something new about coding, create real life scenario examples with a minimum of 10 examples that your students needs to code. For example make them write 10 different functions that do something in different situations, and niches - business related function, pet related function, vegetables related function, cars related function, water related function and so on.

Why? It is very hard for a new person to grasp the concept of coding, most of the courses and tutorials do that - this is a function, they give you an example with function a + b that returns the sum and that's it. So when you are a complete beginner then you struggle to figure out a function that can applied in complete different situation like a function to sort a music playlist.

By proving different scenarios from the real world for your students and break it into small chunks after each new concept and lesson, it will be easier for them to understand better how you can use this skill in the real world. By making them repeat it with different examples will help them memorize it faster, and recall the solutions when they see something similar that they need to do.

Why this works in my opinion? I live in a small country and in high school I had to learn English. The teacher made us write every single new word that we were introduced to in our notebooks, like minimum of 30 times. Not only that helped to memorize the words and their right way of syntax but then you get to start using them in a more complicated sentences.

My English is far from perfect but I haven't taken any addition classes and it helped me a lot so far.

After all you are also teaching a language, with which you communicate with the computer, I think you can take a look at different disciplines and apply some really good practices to make you a better code teacher.

This of course is from my personal perspective like a super beginner that try to do that in his free time online.

Best of luck to you.

Once they've got their feet, make sure you continue to offer thorough and critical code reviews until they're well settled.

Although there is a significant number of Negative Nancies here I believe it can be teached but, even though I know it won't be a popular outlook, I see it like learning/teaching blacksmithy. Sure there is a theory, like which metal to choose, which degree to cook and which hammer to build but theory gets you so far. You need to show how a sword is actually done.

The concepts of programming can be learned from the noosphere easily, the resources are there to learn but good practices are not. A teacher should pass these as well, in addition to "what is a variable" etc. stuff. And like any course, if the student doesn't actually work on the stuff on his free time it is worthless - another analogy can be a guitar course here. No matter who your teacher is, if you don't play it at home willingly... you won't be able to learn how to play guitar.

My 2 cents...