I love reading these. My daughter is only 2 but I've been compiling these tips as "learning hacks" to present as soon as she's ready since before she was conceived! I was also introduced to software development through "hacking" some 20 years ago and immediately fell in love (ms frontpage websites made in school and hosted on free hosting servers that injected banner ads.. my first ever hack was getting rid of those pesky ads with a bit of js back when "js is a dead technology, don't use it" :D) Ive since believed the thrill of "hacking" is the best intro into programming in that it's like a sort of gamification of logical thinking where you need to beat the game by finding and exploiting the weaknesses. Best of luck and please continue sharing your experiences!
Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
51–60 of 109 posts
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
“I had a computer class based on Logo that managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this”
That’s not Logo, that’s the teaching. The whole point of Logo is that it should be 99% self-taught. The teacher’s job is to teach the bits that aren’t naturally discoverable (see my three steps above), and to offer hints and nudges towards rich new areas for exploration should they bog themselves down in old, crude inefficiencies and repetitions.
Bad Logo teaching is making kids memorize what all the buttons are called and what each one does when you push it, of setting “problems” that have one right answer which the student must return or is penalized for being wrong.
Yes the “turtle” was limited, and if all you ever did was draw “turtle graphics” with it then, yeah, you’d quickly grow bored.
But being limited to turtle drawing only was a limitation of the hardware and software of Papert’s time, plus the inability of most adults—particularly those in charge of the purse strings—to see the need to expand that platform to provide other opportunities as well. That damned turtle should’ve been just the first of a myriad of Logo “expansion packs”, but those damned grown-ups couldn’t see that because they lacked the imagination to do so. (Though if they had, they’d have been terrified by the thought: creating kids who think for themselves and can run circles around them—inconceivable!)
Because all those adults saw Logo as was just another hoop to teach students to mechanistically jump through in rote-taught lessons before putting it away and moving onto teaching the next hoop, not as an open-ended user-led tool to be put in the hands of the kids so that they can explore and experiment and teach themselves while pursuing whatever it is that is of interest to them.
That’s the worst thing about authoritarians: all they ever want to do is to make more of the same.
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#53Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#54Earlier 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…
“I had a computer class based on Logo that managed to make me bored and disinterested with stuff like this” That’s not Logo, that’s the teaching. The whole point of Logo is that it should be 99% self -taught. The teacher’s job is to teach the bits that aren’t naturally discoverable (see my three steps above), and to offer hints and nudges towards rich new areas for exploration should they bog themselves down in old,…
> That’s not Logo, that’s the teaching.
No, it's logo, because we were taught in exactly the manner you describe, to the letter. In fact I might have enjoyed it more if there were more structure.
I hated art class as a kid, and turning computer lab into art class was not something I was ready for back then. At the time I was laser focused on wanting to learn to program, and I saw logo as something different than programming.
You're using this as a weird segway to rant about authoritarians, but you're also telling me that there's a single way to teach kids programming that everyone needs to adhere to, and anyone who doesn't like it was taught wrong. Seems a bit tone deaf.
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#55Captains 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…
“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.”
Her first instinct was not wrong. I’ve been coding 20 years now (self-taught automator who turned pro after the first 10), and though I absolutely love what programming enables me to do I still despise the amount of hostility and crapwork that “popular” modern programming platforms put me through in order to do it.
I hope your daughter goes on to achieve whatever she wants to achieve, and if that should be programming I hope she never forgets that early distaste, because that is the only thing that will drive substantive improvement in a culture and industry grown fat and complacent on the sorry status quo.
--
“The reasonable woman adapts herself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to herself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable woman.” ― George Bernard Shaw (paraphrased)
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#56I love reading these. My daughter is only 2 but I've been compiling these tips as "learning hacks" to present as soon as she's ready since before she was conceived! I was also introduced to software development through "hacking" some 20 years ago and immediately fell in love (ms frontpage websites made in school and hosted on free hosting servers that injected banner ads.. my first ever hack was getting rid of those…
would you be willing to share this compilation of yours?
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Music programming languages could also be fun. Bonus points if you can produce interesting music and interesting graphics at the same time.
When reading your comment I remembered the old LucasArts game called Loom. I wonder if that would be a proper jumping off point for a music language? Of course, my memory could just be bad.
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#58I'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…
As a teen I “learnt” C (and later C++) by reading books from the library. I didn’t have access to a C/C++ compiler (the best I had was a Mac Classic and Pascal). I wrote my code with pencil and paper and checked syntax against examples.
Worked well for me — I aced all the C and C++ computer science papers all through 100/200/300-levels at University.
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#59if int(guess) == int(lulu + boonie): There ... I fixed it.
guess = int(input(question))
Re: Teaching our five year old to code by cheating
#60I'm glad Greg Baugues started blogging again. I discovered his blog all the way back in 2013 with one of my favorite articles of his, "Autoworkers of our generation" [1] and I've been reading his blog religiously until he stopped writing circa 2017.
Glad to discover he got back to writing recently.