Step 1: You don't.
Yes, or at least make sure that they actually want to learn before going down that path.
How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
11–20 of 49 posts
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#12The title of the talk is a bit misleading, since it's really all about teaching young people in a classroom setting with assignments and credit. Which happens to be very relevant to me personally right now, but doesn't at all help if what you want to do is get your nana to provide more enlightening diagnostic feedback with her tech problems.
This talk does seem to confirm a lot of the things I've suspected about teaching tech, specifically that vocabulary has to come first, to give students the language to describe what they want and the problems they're having, and to give them the mental hooks to hang concepts and practice from.
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
How dare someone use resources in their native language as an example.
Sure, if the entire presentation was in German, that'd make sense. As it stands, it's just sloppy.
The conference is German, the speaker is German, the event is being held in Germany, and the CCC is German. The fact that the presentation is in English is the anomaly here.
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's my experience. I wanted to teach programming to my SO, because I know she's extremely intelligent and she could do programming quite well. She just had a mental block, and never got it past the second week of the (Coursera) class, when she had to program something small and felt extremely stupid for not knowing how to do it. I remember going through the same when I was studying programming though. Some people…
The mental blocks can be totally unrelated to the difficulty of the concepts, too. My wife is also smart and totally capable of learning to program. I've seen her self-learn subjects (e.g., how email headers work or basic SQL queries) just to scratch a particular itch, though she didn't think of it as learning a technical skill. But she'll never bother learning to program, because she's "not a tech person". It all go…
Type theory and lambda calculus? It's like, here's some neat math concepts. Oh look we can use it to prove statements about addition and stuff. Psyke, now you know haskell.
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mental blocks can be totally unrelated to the difficulty of the concepts, too. My wife is also smart and totally capable of learning to program. I've seen her self-learn subjects (e.g., how email headers work or basic SQL queries) just to scratch a particular itch, though she didn't think of it as learning a technical skill. But she'll never bother learning to program, because she's "not a tech person". It all go…
Type theory and lambda calculus? It's like, here's some neat math concepts. Oh look we can use it to prove statements about addition and stuff. Psyke, now you know haskell.
> Psyke
Well that's a new one for me haha.
It's just "psych". Like "Here's a million dollars. Oh, PSYCH!" An older (more complete) phrasing is "to psych someone out", meaning you mess with somebody (psychologically). I've also seen it spelled "sike", but never "psyke". I wonder if your spelling is common too.
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#16Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#17Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Type theory and lambda calculus? It's like, here's some neat math concepts. Oh look we can use it to prove statements about addition and stuff. Psyke, now you know haskell.
> Psyke Well that's a new one for me haha. It's just "psych". Like "Here's a million dollars. Oh, PSYCH!" An older (more complete) phrasing is "to psych someone out", meaning you mess with somebody (psychologically). I've also seen it spelled "sike", but never "psyke". I wonder if your spelling is common too.
Not sure. I have a hard time spelling any word where I don't have a good grasp on the etymology involved. Also there are some words that I can't spell AND pronounce, but if I have a hard time with one I can do the other (they change places several times before I get used to them). Finally, I almost always spell snake when I really mean to spell snack (including this time, I had to fix it).
Psyke came up on the google search, so I guessed it was good enough even though it looked a bit funny to me. Of the two, warhammer 40k and psychology, my last thought was of warhammer 40k, so I'm guessing that's why I ended up spelling it the way I did.
Psychology, physics, and psychics all give me trouble as well.
(Hard core research into etymology and linguistics are on the list of things to learn. I'm guessing I'll continue to have these sorts of issues until I start making headway.)
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#19Step 1: You don't.
This is true. It comes down to two things I think that go hand in hand
1. Do they have enough persistance to learn and then tackle problems 2. Do they even care?
Most people just aren't wired that way and it's nice enough if you find someone who's even willing to listen to you talk about technical things
Re: How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]
#20I have half an idea for a children's book that I may one day write called "Teach your parents to code" targeted at a child and a parent where neither of them can code. The idea is that you put the child in the driver's seat making them motivated to help their parents. At the same time, they have to learn the concepts in order to explain them. In explaining the concepts to an adult they not only self review what they have learned, but the adult can also review and catch misconceptions.