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82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

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Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#81

Post by Ancalagon »

octorian wrote: post #57
jdietrich wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that openness and confidence are major factors. Having taught older adults to use computers, one of the major difficulties is getting them past the fear that they might "break" the computer and the need to memorise rote instructions rather than experiment with the interface. The body language is quite distinctive - tentatively pressing keys with an outstretched index finger as if the keyboard might jump up an…

I've seen these exact behaviors countless times, ever since I was the "kid who knows computers" (in the 90's) trying to walk adults through using them. Oh, and when you ask them to "look at the screen", they're only mentally able to process a 2-square-inch "window area" at any given moment. So you first have to direct their gaze, very specifically, before you can actually expect them to read and process anything. (Of…

As an engineer myself, I'd say one of the harder aspects of my job is using all the freaking GUIs and interfaces presented to me. Granted, I wouldn't consider many of these interfaces to even be considered "good" by most standards, but so many designs are unintuitive I really think thats the root of the problem.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#82

Post by andrei_says_ »

bazooka_penguin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found m…

Could it be that aging has to do more with the accumulation of “knowledge”, where knowledge literally means replacing perceptions with “I know”s and thus becoming more rigid and disengaged from the senses...

...and not so much as physical aging as the cause of these.

Maybe we are mostly surrounded by people who age without questioning culture around them, or their mind and body habits.

I’ve found that with age and certain practices I’ve become more available to learning, more available to retraining/rewiring of habits, and more responsive to change. My strong opinions are more loosely held and I constantly focus on letting go of any grasping that causes me suffering.

“Drop it while it’s hot” has a whole and new wonderful meaning. My body is aging but my experience of the world is becoming more colorful, more vibrant and more exciting.

My dad is close to 80 year old, an active surgeon, at the top of his field, actively publishing papers, teaching, seeing patients, driving to jobs in different cities, with yoga and tennis on a semi regular basis while writing a book and editing a magazine. Many of these require him using a desktop and laptop computers, he just got an android smartphone which I wished him luck with because it’s too complex for me to support.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#83

Post by sytelus »

If I understand correctly, she started out with Swift as her first language?

Wakamiya soon bought programming books and learned Apple’s Swift programming language through lessons with a programmer, nearly 200 miles away from her home in Japan's Kanagawa Prefecture, via Facebook Messenger and Skype.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#84

Post by disordinary »

There's been quite a few studies that learning things like new languages forges new neuron pathways and helps fight off dementia and other age related brain diseases.

I wonder if there's been any studies to the cognitive benefits of teaching the elderly to code?

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#85

Post by dahart »

hermitdev wrote: post #78
EliRivers wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience is the opposite. I don't have to unlearn native patterns. I learn a different pattern, and switch to it. Because I understand grammar and the parts of speech as an adult, at a level beyond simply having copied it from people around me, I can understand foreign, completely different grammar, at an intellectual level. When I speak (and learn) Japanese, my conscious understanding of Japanese grammar simply…

Interesting. I admittedly don't have much experience learning foreign languages; I did K-12 in the US and was only required to take 2 years of Spanish. I'd assumed from discussions with other students taking, for example German, that it'd be more difficult. Versus programming languages, I've learned, C, C++, C#, Java, Python and Perl (and I supposed a modicum of JS) as well as x86, x64, 68k, MIPS, z80 and Atmel AVR a…

Spoken languages are a lot harder to learn than programming languages.

But think about how much faster you learned JS than the time it took to learn C (or whatever your first programming language was.)

Don't forget to account for the vast amount of learned information you get to leverage from your first language, even if you have to unlearn a few things or learn a few new things.

Even though JS is very different from C, learning JS was much, much faster for me than learning C was, because I already knew a whole lot about the way all languages work just from learning C.

I'm learning Icelandic right now, and it only took a few weeks of 30 minutes a day to cover some basic conversational skills, gather maybe 100 or so words of vocabulary, and get an introduction to the basic speech patterns & conjugation. It'll take a lot longer to be fluent, but children take years to get that far, because they're starting from scratch and don't have connections to build on. I see a ton of connections to German and English that kids wouldn't.

It's also hard to compare programming to high school Spanish, since it's easy for us to spend 10 hours a day programming, but in high school we topped out at like 3 hours a week of Spanish exposure, and most of that wasn't practicing very hard.

I moved to Mexico as a child (during my first grade year), and learned enough Spanish to go to school, play with the kids, etc. I feel like I'm picking up languages faster now than I did then.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#86

Post by zargon »

combatentropy wrote: post #16

A point of clarification: "She's been dabbling in the tech field since the age of 60." Still impressive though! Also, the app isn't described until 3/4 into the article: "The app, based on the annual Japanese doll festival of Hina Matsuri, invites players to arrange 12 ornamental dolls --- representing the country's emperor, family and guests --- in a specific order."

The article goes on to define "dabbling in the tech field" as buying a computer and creating Excel art.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#87

Post by wallflower »

always_good wrote: post #17
bazooka_penguin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found m…

I wonder the same thing trying to learn a new language. I notice the biggest difference between me and a child is that children don't care about messing up. Meanwhile I often have this worthless apprehension of "better not practice Spanish on these Spanish speakers, I might mess up and feel stupid." I tried to learn Spanish like I learned how to program. Now I'm living proof that you can become good enough to read bo…

> Now I'm living proof that you can become good enough to read books in Spanish yet amaze people with your inability understand spoken Spanish.

Two quick hacks to try.

1) Stop reading books in Spanish silently. Read them out loud. This will force your brain to create neural pathways between understanding, comprehending, and speaking.

2) Put in your earphones and walk down the street. Play something that is like a Spanish conversation podcast and try to mimic what they are saying. Doing it in public will help conquer the 'ego' that gets in the way of making mistakes in public and eventually with other people.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#88

Post by dyukqu »

bazooka_penguin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found m…

>I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude

It reminded me a quote (that I'll try to interpret/translate as best as I can): That's not you stop playing games as you get older, it is you get older when you stop playing games. I am a young person, but I live it, feel it as I age.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#89

Post by profalseidol »

bazooka_penguin wrote: post #4

I wonder how much of brain elasticity in as adults is just due to attitude. I generally find kids more eager to jump into new things, while adults are more stubborn and complacent towards new experiences. Once you have money or kids it's a lot easier to just have someone else do it for you. Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat, and she's found m…

> Still, at 82 I imagine most people will start developing issues with memory so it probably isn't an easy feat

This is where you've made a presumption using your imagination.

Re: 82-Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding

#90

Post by jadedhacker »

learc83 wrote: post #54
gowld wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teaching beginners? Sure, most little kids are immature and don't understand the big picture concepts of general strategy that adults already learned before they started studying chess. And adult many likely already had some chess experience. But Progressing through to expert or world-class? History verifies the conventional wisdom that ages ~12-30 show the greatest gains. And when you look over to things like langua…

If a child tried to learn language the way adults do, they would be far more likely to fail. The difference in circumstances is likely greater than the difference in brain plasticity past a few years old.

For what it's worth, the actual structure of the brain starts off with way too many neurons and connections and starts paring them down. Learning is creation, but it is also destruction. Removing useless connections is valuable. A lot of the paring down happens in your teens with the process reaching a stable state in the mid-20s.

This doesn't mean learning ceases past the point (clearly not). But it does mean that changing synaptic weights and forming new synapses comprise the bulk of learning rather than new neuronal projections and creating new neurons of which the later two become insignificant with small exceptions (such as the generation of new neurons in a small region called the SVZ and also in the hippocampus, a region important for memory though I don't know if the role of these new neurons is known in any great detail).

Adult learning necessarily uses restricted mechanisms compared with children and adolescents. It's still a general learning machine though, though rate of learning might suffer (I'm not familiar with that part of the field).

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