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Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

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Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#41

Post by hansbo »

globular-toast wrote: post #30
boltefnovor wrote: post #7

Kids should be taught programming when they express an interest, and when their brain is ready which in my non-facts based opinion is 11-13 years old. Trying to make kids learn programming without them being interested is about the parent wanting their children to be like them.

Agreed. Everyone wants to share what they love with someone else, but you have to respect the fact that others won't love what you love. 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…

Also, don't be disappointed if boys just want to be fathers. 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.

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#42

Post by xorcist »

globular-toast wrote: post #30
boltefnovor wrote: post #7

Kids should be taught programming when they express an interest, and when their brain is ready which in my non-facts based opinion is 11-13 years old. Trying to make kids learn programming without them being interested is about the parent wanting their children to be like them.

Agreed. Everyone wants to share what they love with someone else, but you have to respect the fact that others won't love what you love. 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…

> Take them to museums. Involve them in your hobbies and your friends' hobbies if possible

This!

Also, focus on removing obstacles to learning, rather than pushing them to learn.

The best way to get a kid interest in music is to keep a second hand guitar lying around (tuned, what a coincidence) on the couch. The next best thing is to play yourself from time to time.

Everything else is just noise.

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#43

Post by gwd »

boltefnovor wrote: post #25
gwd wrote: post #21

I've done something a bit like this for "career days" for elementary school kids. I coded up a perl script that was basically something like this: #!/usr/bin/perl $score = $ARGV[0] if ($score > 90) { print "A"; elsif ($score > 80) { print "B"; elsif ($score > 70) { print "C"; elsif ($score > 60) { print "D"; } else { print "E"; } And I'd ask, "What do you think happens if you put in '85'? What about 10000? What about…

Look I don’t want to criticise but I’ve got to say, this is the sort of thing that makes kids hate programming. “Hey kids ready to do some super exciting math in a computer program?” Nah. I had a computer teacher who managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this, despite me being crazy crazy crazy interested in computers. The best way to teach kids programming is via programmable graphics I.e visual…

All I can say is it went pretty well for me. Remember that this wasn't a full-on class; it was a "career day" where I had at most 5 minutes with any student, most of whom had no experience with any kind of programming whatsoever. And my main goal was actually to get "normal", not crazy-interested-in-computers children to experience the cognitive dissonance of running `./grade.pl 10000` and seeing it print out "A". My favorite response was the girl who knitted her eyebrows for a few seconds and then exclaimed, "Oh, I see -- you tell it what to do and then it does it!" Yes, exactly. Whatever she ends up doing with her life, her attitude towards computers will different now.

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#44

Post by watwut »

globular-toast wrote: post #30
boltefnovor wrote: post #7

Kids should be taught programming when they express an interest, and when their brain is ready which in my non-facts based opinion is 11-13 years old. Trying to make kids learn programming without them being interested is about the parent wanting their children to be like them.

Agreed. Everyone wants to share what they love with someone else, but you have to respect the fact that others won't love what you love. 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…

> Take them to museums. Involve them in your hobbies and your friends' hobbies if possible

How is that any different then "and show them also some programming"?

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#45

Post by diggan »

boltefnovor wrote: post #39
reificator wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look I don't want to criticise but I've got to say, this is the sort of thing that got me into programming as a kid. "Hey kids ready to do some super exciting graphics with turtles in a computer program?" Nah. I had a computer class based on Logo that managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this, despite me being crazy crazy crazy interested in computers. Then as I got older I actually did get into…

Yeah logo and Perl are both boring as batshit and great ways to turn kids off.

I think you got the wrong takeaway here. It's not about Logo and Perl specifically, it's about making sure that whatever you do, it's enjoyable for the kids. For some that's math, for others it's graphics, for others it's "hacking". Whatever works for one, isn't guaranteed to work for the others.

Just as for some, Perl is pleasure, for others, Perl is pain.

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#47

Post by Joeri »

boltefnovor wrote: post #7

Kids should be taught programming when they express an interest, and when their brain is ready which in my non-facts based opinion is 11-13 years old. Trying to make kids learn programming without them being interested is about the parent wanting their children to be like them.

Depends on the kid and the kind of programming. Scratch can be taught at a younger age because it is very visual and the basics do not require much abstract reasoning.

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#48

Post by gwd »

diggan wrote: post #45
boltefnovor wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah logo and Perl are both boring as batshit and great ways to turn kids off.

I think you got the wrong takeaway here. It's not about Logo and Perl specifically, it's about making sure that whatever you do, it's enjoyable for the kids. For some that's math, for others it's graphics, for others it's "hacking". Whatever works for one, isn't guaranteed to work for the others. Just as for some, Perl is pleasure, for others, Perl is pain.

And I didn't do anything like "teaching them perl". In fact, I think I may have actually used bash; and if I were doing it today I'd probably use python. The point was to have something that you could reasonably guess what it was doing from looking at it. You don't have to know anything about perl replace "A" with "E" and vice versa.

And although I wouldn't call this exercise "fun", it's something that connects with a part of their life they understand. Nobody would actually write a script like this, but someone could totally write a function like this as part of a larger program, and have exactly the kind of "bug" that was displayed there; or, could be hacked in exactly the same way.

Kids are sharp enough to know when a skill is going to be useful, even if it's not "fun".

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#49

Post by tommilukkarinen »

Captains log, stardate 345.455.33:

I record this for people who might want to try this with kids around 10 years old:

I made a game with my daughter, according to the .apk date it was 5 years ago so she was 10.

I started by making a project in android studio. Then a gameloop, where you had one function for drawing and one function for handling clicks/screen presses. So when you pressed 'play' on studio, it opened an 'empty game' on her own phone. All you had to do to make a game, was to edit 2 different functions and to make variables to pass info.

After that we started coding together and I no longer touched the keyboard. I just asked what she would like to do next, and gave advice how it could be done. She had patience for about 15 minutes at a time, and after of total maybe 2 hours, calendar time 4 weeks, we finished a 'hit a mole' game. I was quite careful not to put any pressure like 'lets do a bit more'. And asked maybe twice a week, 'would you like to do some coding'.

After the project she said it was 'not her thing'. This summer she was coding web-UI with Java+IntelliJ in my work as a summer trainee, and now she said she enjoyed it.

Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating

#50

Post by Buttons840 »

hansbo wrote: post #41
globular-toast wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Everyone wants to share what they love with someone else, but you have to respect the fact that others won't love what you love. 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…

Also, don't be disappointed if boys just want to be fathers. 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.

These statement don't sit well with me. Anyone "just being a " in their life feels incomplete. (I think you were implying this by reversing the genders.)

To the GP, if it's OK for girls to "just be mothers", is it then OK to describe a woman as "just a mother"?

I have a daughter. I suspect that if she becomes "just a mother", what that really means is her skills and interests are so foreign to me that I can't come up with a better description than "just a mother". And I hope that I will not be OK with that.

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