Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

so many overdeveloped, hyper-real, dopamine-avalanches fighting for their attention--good luck getting them to pay attention to mere reality after that. especially when mere reality has to be introduced in baby steps.

We're just trying to meet him where he is at and try to make sure he is being creative, whatever it is.

The foundational mistake is “teaching programming”. The goal should be to instill (“teach”) critical thinking and analytical problem solving skills, and a “programming environment” just another tool, like pencil and paper, which the student can use when exercising those skills on real-world problems.

Whereas “teaching programming” is teaching language features: what all the buttons are and what they do when you push them. Thus mastery of button-pushing becomes feted as the end-goal of itself, instead of being just some tiresome but necessary tool-practising crapwork (like memorizing the ten-times tables and drawing all the letters from A to Z) that you have to go through on the way to achieving your true goals (which can be anything).

Once again, I point to Papert’s Logo[1] as a good demonstration of just how simple that PE can—and should—be to serve that purpose. Logo’s core concepts can be communicated in just three steps:

1. This is a Word.

2. This is how you Perform words.

3. This is how you Add your own words.

Anything else that the platform provides, such as its dictionary of pre-defined words, can and should be explorable and discoverable; something today’s hardware and software can support and encourage without blinking. Let the students teach that crap to themselves if/as/when they need it, and keep the adults on hand just to observe when students start running themselves down a dead-end and prompt them to other possibilities they had not realized/considered.

Oh, and it really should go without saying that the PE’s error messaging must be the top of their class. Because errors aren’t the “wrong answers” of which a student should feel embarrassed and ashamed, but fresh questions in their own right which spark awareness, exploration, self-correction, and insight.

--

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Mindstorms-Children-Computers-Powerfu...

I've tried to encourage my little (he's 21 now) brother to get into programming, but he's just not interested. I'm disappointed, but that's my problem, not his. He's had every opportunity to get into it. He's got his own computer and a big brother willing to teach him. If he wanted to do it he would've done it.

My other brother became a mechanic despite nobody encouraging him to do it, nor providing him with the resources when he was younger. He had to go out and find old lawnmower engines to work on by himself. He was actively discouraged from bringing home junk by our parents, but he did it anyway.

The vast majority of people do not want to become programmers. The best thing you can do for children is to expose them to as many things as you can. Take them to museums. Involve them in your hobbies and your friends' hobbies if possible and if they want to. You'll know when they've found what they want to do.

Also, don't be disappointed if girls just want to be mothers. It's one of the most important and noble jobs there is. Don't discourage it because you don't think it's as important as what you do.