Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–26 of 26 posts

Re: Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

#21

Post by mikeshi42 »

ahsanhilal wrote: post #15
mikeshi42 wrote: post #13

I teach a 7 week course (it's only on weekends and 3 hours each day). I'm not 100% sure of how effective my teaching has been, based on my student's feedback they all really enjoy the course even when I'm pushing at a very rigorous pace. (All my students have almost no programming background at all and the course is aimed to hopefully engage students to further pursue CS and have a solid foundation of knowledge to do…

Hey Mike (sorry if that is incorrect). Can you email me when you get a chance? I would really like to see your slides in detail if possible. Also, your doing more at 17 then I was, and I would love to talk more. (email in profile)

Hi ahsanhilal, I don't think I can see your email on your profile. You can contact me at mike(at)scoreportal.org

Re: Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

#22

Post by ahsanhilal »

mikeshi42 wrote: post #21
ahsanhilal wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Mike (sorry if that is incorrect). Can you email me when you get a chance? I would really like to see your slides in detail if possible. Also, your doing more at 17 then I was, and I would love to talk more. (email in profile)

Hi ahsanhilal, I don't think I can see your email on your profile. You can contact me at mike(at)scoreportal.org

sent you an email

Re: Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

#23

Post by wiseleo »

ahsanhilal wrote: post #20
wiseleo wrote: post #19

I consider background completely irrelevant. With sites like c9.io, he can have a coding environment in the cloud and access it from any web browser, including a random library computer. What needs to happen is inspiration. If you can inspire someone to believe in himself and show how comparatively easy current technologies are, you should be able to ignite the self-sustaining desire to get better. My approach would…

Thanks for the well thought out reply! The course layout you have written out is quite thorough. The only thing is that for someone who does not have any programming background, they need to see immediate results to gain an understanding of how powerful code is. That is why I thought Html/CSS is a good starting point and then go in deeper. I am open to other methodologies, and we can talk more on email if you would l…

It's a bit radical, but I am tempted to test it. :)

I am wiseleo on just about every website and gmail, so feel free to send me an instant message.

For me, seeing an executable test spec for the first time was very surprising and revealing. There is an entire book "Refactoring: improving the design of existing code" that teaches you how to name functions so your code reads like English.

After all, this is valid Jasmine from near the beginning of my test suite:

it("should return an array containing at least one object", function() { expect(menu.length).toBeGreaterThan(0); });

It reads like English. If you can show that code can be written like this rather than like typical code, you will notice an immediate jump in confidence.

If you show that in Rspec, where the alien-looking

function ( ) { };

is replaced with

  do
end

and expect('should do something useful') becomes expect "should do something useful"

it becomes even more approachable.

Re: Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

#24

Post by bayonetz »

raphaelrk wrote: post #5

Might I recommend processing.js? It's got a very shallow learning curve even to first-time programmers, there's plenty of support for it, it requires little setup, and lets you create visual applications immediately. If you use https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/cs , KhanAcademy's processing.js curriculum/editor, you'll have no setup, documentation, and lots of examples to look off of. I've been using it for a whi…

I'll second that. I am teaching a workshop to 10 year olds in Processing and it is working out well so far.

Re: Ask HN: Please help me teach CS to a HS student from a very different background

#26

Post by ahsanhilal »

jonhmchan wrote: post #25

I'm the creator of Bento ( http://bentobox.io/ ). I think Bento can help - all the resources there are free and curated by developers. Follow the track left to right, top to bottom. Please reach out if you need any help @jonhmchan

Thanks Jon! Will definitely do
Post reply on HN