Ask HN: How to Teach Coding?

I would only agree with the caveat that someone experienced should read your code, comment on it and improve on it.

I spent years slowly learning how to be a better developer, on my own. If someone had been there early on to tell me: "this is bad because X", I would have progressed twice as fast.

Programming at its core is very easy, building maintainable software is much harder. Knowing what to avoid only comes with experience, but much of that experience can be quickly transferred to you from someone who already has it.

Remembering the very first course I received at 9 y.o. (logo with turtle) the pleasure came from seeing the actual output of the program on the screen: a drawing. Remembering my first C course at 20, whose program was a one liner designed on purpose for us to understand nothing: don't be afraid to tell "I cannot explain you that now" (e.g. why #include). Today if I had to choose a language/platform to teach coding, that would be the Arduino. Simple system, visible output, simple language although perfectly well formed C++.

First, I noticed that I had much more impact teaching things I had done recently (even if I know the theory). So when you create your exercises, try to solve them in order to 1. check the difficulty and 2. know where your students will strugle, what are the main pitfalls you will have to explain them or give them more hints.

Second, a session should be composed of a few exercises with immediate feedbacks / rewards (something quick to code but with enough notion to understand the subject of the day). Then build the momentum toward more complex exercises. The last exercises should be a bit more advanced than the current expected level of your students.

When I was a student, I had this structure were we had a between 6-10 exercises to learn C in 30 days (even if we did not understand all of it under the hood) from nothing to pointers, circular list, object-oriented (with structure) C. I found out that even if most of the students struggle, some of them will try to solve all of the exercises. After many days, they had made tremendous progress and were capable to achieve all of them most of the days.

These students boosted the rest of the class for the next few years as we were encouraged to share knowledge and teach each other.

That's an amazing video Thanks for sharing. How do you suggest to show them the impact of their work - any suggestions?

I actually think step (1) isn't a good way to start unless the pupil has some prior knowledge.

Many (most?) people don't have know how to take a big problem and turn it into something they can make progress on.

You give them the lego bricks and say 'make me a windmill' and they don't have the first clue where to start. They may not even understand that programming is lego.

So, you either have to teach that first. Or, if you want to teach it later, start with a sequence of problems that have one obvious step each.

Some good approaches to attacking a problem too big to be obvious:

1. Break it into smaller and smaller pieces, then implement those pieces.

2. Bite off a small piece that you think you can do, then grow that.

3. Write down everything about it then think very hard about what are the essential characteristics of a solution.