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I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

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Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#21

Post by contravariant »

esrh wrote: post #19
jimmaswell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the…

I've never taught programming, but i find your last point hard to believe. Programming is human-made, and it was created to be understood and used by humans -- in contrast to say, math or science where things just are. Maybe you can claim that only a small subset of people can get great at programming, but i think that the vast majority of people can manage to learn the basics given enough time.

I mean let's set aside the empirical sciences for a moment but mathematics is not just some weird set of rules that fell from the sky. It's designed by humans and for humans.

And for obvious reasons empirical models are also generally made to be understood by humans, though there at least you can argue that the underlying reality was not designed to be intelligible (and frequently isn't hence why we've got shortcuts like thermodynamics to reason about chaos).

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#23

Post by ralphc »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #6

RobotWar lives![1] Yay! I won a RobotWars competition in 1984. I got a T-Shirt. Not $1000. :-/ Later I discovered CoreWar [2] and enjoyed that until I learned all of the main classes of algorithms/bots had been identified. Never heard of Faas Wars but now I'm excited to see what it is like. These programming-based games are way more fun, IMHO, than hackathons. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobotWar [2] http://cor…

Mid-80s there was crobots, you programmed the robots with a subset of C.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#24

Post by steren »

xsmasher wrote: post #18
KMnO4 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm. I went to a gifted school and Lego Mindstorms was on the curriculum. Then in (conventional) high school I hosted a workshop on beginning Python (with Turtle) and half the people couldn’t understand why x=2 after “x=1” and “x+=1”.

They need a consistent framework to understand what is happening - "variables are like little boxes where you can put a number or some letters" and "The equal sign lets you change what is in the box." x+=1 just complicates the situation; use x=x+1 to avoid adding more special rules for now. This stuff is teachable, but it doesn't help that the framework is very different than the similar-looking expressions from math…

Thank you. So many have become blind to how weird the syntaxes of programming languages are when not used to them.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#25

Post by texuf »

steren wrote: post #24
xsmasher wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need a consistent framework to understand what is happening - "variables are like little boxes where you can put a number or some letters" and "The equal sign lets you change what is in the box." x+=1 just complicates the situation; use x=x+1 to avoid adding more special rules for now. This stuff is teachable, but it doesn't help that the framework is very different than the similar-looking expressions from math…

Thank you. So many have become blind to how weird the syntaxes of programming languages are when not used to them.

It’s nearly impossible to remember what it feels like to not know this information. Often the best programming teachers are people who recently learned the material, for that reason.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#26

Post by zarzavat »

texuf wrote: post #25
steren wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. So many have become blind to how weird the syntaxes of programming languages are when not used to them.

It’s nearly impossible to remember what it feels like to not know this information. Often the best programming teachers are people who recently learned the material, for that reason.

I remember exactly my first time learning to code as a kid, the book I used used the "box" analogy for variables and it worked well. It was fairly uneventful experience, I just worked through the exercises at my own pace and was through the book in a couple of weeks.

The problem with learning to program in a classroom environment is that one kid may find exercise one difficult, another kid may find exercise three difficult, etc, the probability that any kid will get 'left behind' at some point is high. Classrooms are pretty bad places for learning.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#29

Post by jimmaswell »

steren wrote: post #24
xsmasher wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need a consistent framework to understand what is happening - "variables are like little boxes where you can put a number or some letters" and "The equal sign lets you change what is in the box." x+=1 just complicates the situation; use x=x+1 to avoid adding more special rules for now. This stuff is teachable, but it doesn't help that the framework is very different than the similar-looking expressions from math…

Thank you. So many have become blind to how weird the syntaxes of programming languages are when not used to them.

In my case I remember choosing x = x + 1 in my examples for this reason, as well as writing print as a function for consistency.

Re: I built my first serverless robot and won $1000

#30

Post by bradknowles »

esrh wrote: post #19
jimmaswell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this a school for gifted kids? I tried teaching some very basic python in high school once when someone formed a "computer club" and it was a total waste of time. Nobody was capable of understanding it. Maybe younger kids are just more receptive but this experience solidified to me that understanding programming is something that some small subset of the population is capable of and can't really be taught to the…

I've never taught programming, but i find your last point hard to believe. Programming is human-made, and it was created to be understood and used by humans -- in contrast to say, math or science where things just are. Maybe you can claim that only a small subset of people can get great at programming, but i think that the vast majority of people can manage to learn the basics given enough time.

Physical activity has existed since long before Homo sapiens. Do some people find it easy to participate in strenuous physical activity while others find it hard?

Why do you think that situation would be different for any other kind of activity that humans take part in?

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