Teaching how to code is broken

Applies to learning foreign languages too. I've spoken to many people that want to "learn Spanish" without having a clue that it's a huge grind to get to basic competency.

I once got to be a fly on the wall (well, a member in the audience) to a graduate project presentation where a team had put together a simple game development environment to get young people excited about programming (Alice, which is still around: https://www.alice.org/). They were presenting their (relatively positive) results on how much engagement they'd seen getting students involved using Alice as opposed to available alternatives for learning beginner programming.

One of the professors in the School of Computer Science raised the question of why Java was chosen as the backing language for the whole project, since it's not a very strongly-typed language and for pedagogy, there are much better languages with more rigorous type safety.

The student presenting began to get a bit flustered when she answered (I believe her answer was something along the lines of familiarity of potential mentors and teachers with the language) and the professor seemed to reject her answer out of hand. Finally, her advisor stepped in and just dead-panned across the room "Because elementary-school students are excited about seeing cool things on screen, not about computing the Ackermann function." General murmurs of laughter all around.

I think those two professors had an ongoing debate behind the scenes that the unfortunate student had just gotten caught in the middle of.

(Fiction short story related to this topic: http://thecodelesscode.com/applicant/2)

IMO this was why the early web was so powerful as a way to on-ramp new developers. I learned coding a little bit before the web, from school materials like writing Pascal programs in DOS, in early 90s. Those were fun little exercises for school, but that was about it. In the late 90s I got the internet and got curious about making web pages, did View Source everywhere and taught myself HTML and basic CSS/JS (nothing more advanced than alert boxes and such at the time) while in high school, and it was what really got me to start my career in software engineering.

Building a web site gives you all the "why"s. It gave you a motivation to learn different aspects of coding. Whether it's the presentation layer in HTML, or application logic in PHP and Javascript. Conditions, loops, arrays and even data structures all make sense when you have all the context of the thing you're trying to build.

(Disclaimer: I work as an online Tutor for an Irish EduTech company which teaches children ages 8-18 to code via after-school and weekend classes.)

This article has the right idea. Our style of teaching varies on the kids age. Younger kids (8-11) are treated much like school children, the teacher presents a topic, kids are given activities to do which they screenshare, then we work through them as a class. This is done in Scratch, mostly.

As the kids get older we take a more hands-off approach, we have tonnes of exercises which take kids through Java via Processing. Learning variables by moving shapes, if statements by adding constraints to those moving shapes, collision detection by moving the mouse around and watching shapes change color as they collide, in the hopes to build their confidence to start building their own games.

This is a highly adaptable form of teaching, although it's only really possible and practical as we have such small class sizes, allowing tutors like me to be able to spend ample time with teach student when issues arise.

Younger students often have the enthusiasm, but they don't know where to guide it, this lends itself well to a lecture then activity format where there's at most a 7-8 minute period of "lecture" followed by an equal amount of activity time.

The older kids often don't need the "lecture" part at all, rather we set them more and more challenging exercises and explain things individually as issues crop up, it allows them to use their own problem solving and initiative and we have seen some excellent programmers come through because of this (some of whom have began working with us as Tutors after they turned 18!)

couldn't agree more - have STEM groups and encourage everyone that wants in, to join, but don't make them sit in the 'special class' separate from everyone else.