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Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
71–80 of 88 posts
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#72Www.coderdojo.org is free
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#73When I was quite young, I started 'programming' by copying code out of magazines. I would run home from school, open up a magazine, write code until dinner, run downstairs after and write code until I had to go to bed. If I repeated that often enough, I would eventually (if I was lucky) be able to compile my code, fix the 14,000 missing pieces of punctuation and then have a (very primitive) game to play and share wit…
I fear that this kind of passion is now harder to achieve, because kids are shown that computers can do amazing stuff from very young age but anything that you can produce yourself will be woefully behind. Back in the day a game copied from a magazine was worse than what one could buy, but not _that_ much worse. This is why, I think, we see people "coding" in Minecraft and Roblox. They have all of the environment set…
While I agree to a certain extent with the point you made in your first paragraph, I'm not sure why you doubt quoted coding with regard to Minecraft and Roblox. Both games have Turing complete languages. Roblox uses Lua.
Minecraft uses javascript on Bedrock, but also has a command block scripting language along with redstone, which together form a unique and mentally stimulating coding environment.
This isn't even mentioning mods which add different languages (Forth or Lua) or modding the game itself, which isn't that difficult to stumble into these days.
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#74Teens/Childs quickly loose interest in something. Find out what they find "hip" or cool, don't expect it to be what you find cool. I would rather support them to program their own Instagram app then to propose them to some hardware programming environment (thinking of educational boards) if they don't like it. Also, learning programming was applied autodidactics for most of us, isn't it? My feeling is that this is th…
It's the content on IG that's fun, not the app itself. Take it from me, someone who half-learned JS and PHP through extremely tedious "build your own FB" tutorials that took 2 hours of setup work (VirtualBox, MAMP, MySQL DB setup, etc etc) before you even started "coding". At best they will end up with something not much more than a static website that can accept image uploads. Forget about live video, stories and th…
You nail it: I find "Instagram" as an application interesting, because it can be approached really easy (file upload and viewer). That even you don't find it interesting anymore supports my point that it should be the kids who decide what to code. I never had an interest in developing games. When I learned JS and PHP (~15yrs ago), I created tons of dynamical websites which nobody used, but which were fun to code.
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fear that this kind of passion is now harder to achieve, because kids are shown that computers can do amazing stuff from very young age but anything that you can produce yourself will be woefully behind. Back in the day a game copied from a magazine was worse than what one could buy, but not _that_ much worse. This is why, I think, we see people "coding" in Minecraft and Roblox. They have all of the environment set…
While I agree to a certain extent with the point you made in your first paragraph, I'm not sure why you doubt quoted coding with regard to Minecraft and Roblox. Both games have Turing complete languages. Roblox uses Lua. Minecraft uses javascript on Bedrock, but also has a command block scripting language along with redstone, which together form a unique and mentally stimulating coding environment. This isn't even me…
Oh, I did not know that (I was only familiar with redstone).
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#76Do they show an interest? Same as playing an instrument you can get them one, teach them a few tricks, send them to classes and then, well, they either want to pursue it or not.
I agree to the extent that a hands-on person might not care for or see the value to learn programming. I had arguments with my younger brother about learning software programming, whereas he liked building computers and building out networks (I’d jibe, ‘pulling cable’).
That said, I don’t think music education is a good analogy, unless you’re working at Guitar Center. I’d say it’s more like learning Spanish, if you want to be a food service manager. It’s not your job to speak nor write in Spanish for Spanish speakers, but it’s damn useful.
So what I’m saying is you don’t have to become a programmer to realize the value of doing a data analysis task in a fraction of the time it takes in Excel. Especially how business likes to pile on work (now you have one more thing to do every week) in a way that design and project-based work does not.
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#77Agreed that they should show an interest before you embark on this. Finding joy in general education is more important than job skills for that age. That said, Ruby and JS are not great languages for teaching fundamentals. They (especially JS) have a lot of weird design decisions that don't translate to other languages and don't map neatly onto problem spaces. If you insist on JS, start with TypeScript at least. But…
I have been teaching my 5 year old daughter Scratch. But we make animated stories and add funny sounds. She has a blast doing it. I am gradually teaching her more complexity but keeping it fun and interesting. I will try to make a course out of it at some point.
This by far beats the maze games I would program in basic back in the 80s.
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#78Code-club sounds great.
I can say from my memory:
I received computer in 1999, on my ~10 birthday.
I don't remember if I had big drive for learning programming, but my mom found me a programming course for kids.
It was once a week for two hours?
We used Visual Basic For Applications (because it was present in every office install)
We mostly did simple cli-like applications, composed of strings of input and message boxes, i.e. quizzes, simple calculators, poem generators, maybe even simple interactive fiction? It took as a year to go through all of the basic primitives.
Later we used form-designer and made simple games with the Timer object.
I liked it :)
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#79High schoolers are so innately passionate about tech today. May be best to let them figure out where their own passion lies. And just be there to sign off on the purchase orders.
In the past year I've witnessed:
Student run AR / VR clubs producing award winning interactive digital content
OS development in Rust for a robotics competition
Computational cinematography for programmable drone swarms to produce short form content for a YouTube channel
Functional design in CAD of a Martian habitat
CV object recognition and tracking app using Core ML
And an automated burrito making machine!
VR edtech content is particularly effective in classroom settings, with near 100% interaction rates. I'd say producing 3D VR / AR content is probably the skill they are most anxious to acquire. And it involves not just getting Oculus type hardware into classrooms and training instructors. But also Blender skills, narrative voice for the new medium, and thinking about localization for global distribution. There's no downside to being able to express one's embodied teenage reality in an immersive imagined world.
Re: Ask HN: How would you teach teens to code in 2019?
#80Arduino is a great tool and language to start out with coding! It is easy to start out blinking an LED, and from there you can do lots of very cool things with servos, speakers, and sensors with a lot of available parts, tutorials, and code libraries.
It requires a little hardware but I think that is what makes it more fun!