Click-bait title, but many good points.
I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
41–50 of 88 posts
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re right, they should find their own interests. However, kids are preyed upon and lots of trivial things are competing for their attention. As a parent you might help then decide when they can’t. Also as a parent one might expose them to different things and build projects together and programming may be one of those. Others may be musical instruments, books, math, sports and other things that put them on a good…
Kids need to learn things themselves and walk their own path. Sure you can guide them away from bad things, but there is too much hand holding and coddling of young people these days. One example is lining playgrounds with rubberized material, resulting in an increase in injuries. Another example is keeping kids away from peanuts which causes an increase in peanut allergies.
Ruberizing playgrounds leads to more injuries? Interesting, I didnt know that. Keeping kids who are not alergic to peanuts away from peanuts is stupid. I let mine eat everything but sugary things and junk foods. My nephew however is alergic to peanuts and was about to die once if it wasnt for an epipen at hand
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#43While I have no interest in breeding, if I did have kids I would let them choose their own interests rather than forcing mine onto them.
Kids find what they like and don't like by being exposed to things. Giving your kid a book is not forcing your interests on them, its okay if they don't like it. I think the author is expressing concern over feeling pressured to teach his young child coding. I don't think its probably that helpful to teach young kids syntax. My 10 year old recently started playing with Scratch on her own, bought herself a book about…
I agree with this. My family didn't have money to buy me things, but I found ways to get into computers and programming myself. In the 7th grade I started helping the school computer teacher run the IT systems because the school didn't know how to do it themselves. In exchange for helping the school manage the computers, they let me play on the computers after school and install BSD and Linux on an older machine that became my toy.
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#44I'm generally in agreement with this, but as I grew up programming and have 3 kids now will provide my $0.02 commentary-
* kids are shaped by what you share and demonstrate with them and what others share and demonstrate, and what takes root and grows in their hearts and minds is what you should encourage and support
* following the taking root metaphor, all kids have different soil and growth patterns and acquire different knowledge domains at different rates. A great deal of the domain acquisition is due tho not to IQ, however one defines it, but by EQ. That is, my observation is that feelings of safety, explorability, curiosity, satisfaction, and competition/conformance are what drive acquisition, and those are mostly or all EQ.
* programming as an activity is horrendously dumb, with stupid incantations and magical abstractions, and a complete disrespect of the human's time and engagement tempo. When it comes to kids, this is absolutely worst case.
* I have seen two very small, narrow exceptions to the above- some robotics kits, and Scratch. My son is 8 and found in Scratch a vehicle for exploration, curiosity and satisfaction, and has done some absolutely amazing things. It is a matter of curiosity for me that problems I found interesting in 6502 assembly when I was 13 and 14 he is tackling at 8 in Scratch.
* we don't have a voice interface tool in our house but I can definitely see voice-first being an engaging "programming" platform for kids, especially for girls.
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#45Each generation will have its own bias.
In the analog world, "jack of all trades" is an inefficient model to develop, but in the digital world, knowing something exists (and having working knowledge) makes planning and execution of innovation that much easier.
They just call it smart and dynamic in the tech world instead of "master of none".
How times change.
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#46My son is almost 6 and I can say with near certainty that he will learn to code regardless of what I have to say about it. He is absolutely mesmerized by computers and as soon as he discovers that he can tell them exactly what to do he will most likely teach himself. It’s exactly what I did—my father worked at IBM and we always had a fairly capable PC at home but he was a mechanical engineer so I was on my own for le…
"I really hope we don’t add coding to the laundry list of rote skills that kids are evaluated on in school."
Why?
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#47I learned programming in elementary school using C-16 and Commodore plus 4 machines in 80s Hungary. It was amazing that we could type in some BASIC command and the computer did what we told it to do. We learned to manage files on disks, I/O, various conditions, etc. It was crazy how a few lines of LOGO could draw a flower on the screen. I was amazed to see it demonstrated that pseudorandom numbers generate the same number on different machines.
Then I got my C64 a bit later since I guess I was enthusiastic about the subject. My problem was not being able to learn fast enough, I couldn't ask from anybody, there was no internet and books were limited in my language. I wanted to learn machine code, but just couldn't, it was an impenetrable wall without a mentor. So I stuck with BASIC and transitioned gaming. I still remember encoding sprites by hand in my workbook instead of paying attention to the class I was at :)
It was all good for discovering that I actually like dealing with computers and I would be interested in going deeper. It was also good to remember that when I got my first Pentium machine that programming is actually approachable and you don't have to be a superhuman genius to write programs.
> But while these products may teach kids specific coding languages, they actually have very little to do with the work of creating software.
You have to start _somewhere_, it doesn't really matter where and how kids learn what a variable, loop, function call is.
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#48My brother asked me when and how I though I could teach my baby niece so that she could make "a lot of money as a developper". My answer was "when she asks for it". There are many things a kid should learn, and among them, a huge number are more important than programming (plus sometimes a pre-requisite for it): - reading - writing - basic maths - critical analysis - building your own idea - defending yourself verbal…
I think programming should enter a kids learning environment around the same time and priority as a second language. How would someone know whether to consider it, if not exposed to it at all? Most people in the English-speaking western world won't make a vast amount of use of that second language. Some will though, and the rest of us will appreciate that the training we did get helps us see things from a different p…
> I think programming should enter a kids learning environment around the same time and priority as a second language.
For a lot of people, than means learning programming before learning english.
Which is incredibly counter productive. It's like learning maths without pen and paper. Sure you can do it, but I wouldn't want to.
Besides, there are only a limited number of hours in the day. Energy and motivation are also in short supply. You can't do everything at once, and even if you manage a bit of parallelism, you'll end up doing a lot supperficially.
Better be sequencial. And prioritize.
> How would someone know whether to consider it, if not exposed to it at all?
Like I said, just like with music, you put it everywhere, and you associate it with joy.
Play with robots, make beautiful programmable lights shows in the kid room, use games like turing tumble, program openly and talk proudly about the result, create bots to annoy the kid in social media, make your own "alexa" system that the whole family can abuse, lay around bare raspi you can fiddle with, etc.
The idea is that you feel like the house in "honey I shrunk the kids". It calls for experimenting.
> Most people in the English-speaking western world won't make a vast amount of use of that second language.
First, that's not most of the world. Second, of course they would. It opens an entire different culture that make you think differently, grow differently. Sure, you can put a number on it, but it's huge, and it must happen soon, or it will unlikely happen at all.
It's hard to learn a language by yourself unless you travel abroad, while learning programming alone is easy.
In fact, if you have the money, sending your kid abroad in hight school or college is fantastic.
> Most won't use their Chemistry or Physics education in day to day life, but it will help them understand the world better.
And because you had to learn all that at the same time, most people don't understand basic physics, chemistry or maths. They don't speak a second language either. They lost everything, trying to do all the things.
> As our world becomes dominated by software, training in it becomes similar - even those who aren't going to go all in and follow a career in it, can conceivably benefit from some training.
Software is just regular life, automated and faster.
Learn real life first.
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#49My son is almost 6 and I can say with near certainty that he will learn to code regardless of what I have to say about it. He is absolutely mesmerized by computers and as soon as he discovers that he can tell them exactly what to do he will most likely teach himself. It’s exactly what I did—my father worked at IBM and we always had a fairly capable PC at home but he was a mechanical engineer so I was on my own for le…
you can't tell. my kid was like that at 6 and now he's 14 and he's only interested in gaming, marginally hacking (rooting his console and playing pirate games) but not writing code. I feel he finds it boring, too tedious, error prone, repetitive process.
Re: I’m a Developer. I Won’t Teach My Kids to Code, and Neither Should You (2018)
#50My brother asked me when and how I though I could teach my baby niece so that she could make "a lot of money as a developper". My answer was "when she asks for it". There are many things a kid should learn, and among them, a huge number are more important than programming (plus sometimes a pre-requisite for it): - reading - writing - basic maths - critical analysis - building your own idea - defending yourself verbal…
I think programming should enter a kids learning environment around the same time and priority as a second language. How would someone know whether to consider it, if not exposed to it at all? Most people in the English-speaking western world won't make a vast amount of use of that second language. Some will though, and the rest of us will appreciate that the training we did get helps us see things from a different p…
Languages can start very young though. Locally I'm familiar with a lot of families of mixed-nationality. In my own case my partner's native language is Finnish and mine English; our child grew up hearing/understanding both, and now speaks both of them to the appropriate parent.
(It's quite fascinating to see that play out, we were walking in the street recently and somebody stopped to ask me a question. He butted in and said "Daddy speaks English", in Finnish, to the stranger.)