81–90 of 109 posts
these days, and at that age, what you exclude is probably more important than what you teach. 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.
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"Just a regular guy" is still assumed to have distinct personality, interests, hobbies and skills. "Just a mom" is not. That is not the statement on what actual moms are like, but what people imagine when they hear the phrase. Like in the original comment this started with "girls just want to be mothers" is contrasted with being a person who has any out of parenting interests at all. And for all the talk about "noble…
> "Just a regular guy" is still assumed to have distinct personality, interests, hobbies and skills. "Just a mom" is not. Speak for yourself. Sounds like projection to me. Do you have children? Parents can be very proud of their children's accomplishments.
And parent "living exclusively through childrens achievements" is object of criticism. That situation is not good for children, because they end up being pushed into parents dreams. It is unfair to children to expect them to be your source of proudness or whatever.
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.
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Hardly. Programming should be treated like reading: an essential life skill. And if you use reading as the example, you can start developing an interest in books before the child is actually old enough to read. The OP isn't taking his daughter through a coding course, just showing her that cool things are capable via coding. What could be wrong with that?
I'm curious why anyone would think programming is an essential life skill, considering how many successful people are alive today who cannot code. Another thought: when ML starts getting applied to solving programming (see recent GPT-3 demos for many examples), do you think by the time that 5 year old is 20, programming will still be a viable career for humans?
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I'm curious why anyone would think programming is an essential life skill, considering how many successful people are alive today who cannot code. Another thought: when ML starts getting applied to solving programming (see recent GPT-3 demos for many examples), do you think by the time that 5 year old is 20, programming will still be a viable career for humans?
As time goes on the more essential it will become as it is one of the last jobs to be taken by AI.
I think people will always learn math, programming, and natural languages for fun and intellectual growth, but I don't see those being paying jobs in 2 decades, when AI will be vastly superior to us.
For example, think about how many millions bugs are because of the most basic of human errors, time and time again, and the huge costs associated with that.
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> In general I think starting from nothing is the original sin of programming pedagogy I think you're right in saying that. Back when I was in school, I learnt a lot by copying BASIC programs from mags and typing them in and then modifying them. I don't think I even acknowledge that early stage much now given that learning strategies have evolved from there. edit: Thinking back to that, it seems to me that one of the…
I know this is naive but I have a lot of hope for Racket in this space. I'm just hoping it gets more institutional support for making educational tools with it. The line numbers definitely help you imagine the computer mechanically reading and executing the lines. I wasn't taught with BASIC so in the few times I've had to modify a program with meaningful line numbers I have often used make or similar to just put them…
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Just putting this out there: You don't need a windows machine. Minecraft, including programming mods like ComputerCraft run fine on Ubuntu (and therefore probably on a lot of other distros).
I was considering this initially - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/code-minecraft... - but ComputerCraft (& ComputerCraftEdu) look like a lot more fun. Thanks!
(I would recommend playing a bigger modpack where ComputerCraft is included)
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…
From there I made guessing games and text based rock paper scissor games and stuff. I didn't get into any kind of graphics programming until I was older.
Just being able to tell the computer what to do and make things happen with words on the screen was what got me fascinated with programming.
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I know this is naive but I have a lot of hope for Racket in this space. I'm just hoping it gets more institutional support for making educational tools with it. The line numbers definitely help you imagine the computer mechanically reading and executing the lines. I wasn't taught with BASIC so in the few times I've had to modify a program with meaningful line numbers I have often used make or similar to just put them…
Racket is a fantastic language! If I may ask, what are you looking for? In your previous comment you alluded to live-reloading and graphics; both of which are possible but a little clunky at the moment.
I think what's left is building it more or less. Also structuring the code for education. For instance keeping the complicated, scary code out of files that will be modified early.