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Teaching how to code is broken

neil.computer

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Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#151

Post by another_story »

908B64B197 wrote: post #142
another_story wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True to some degree, but I think it does help girls get involved in areas where boys are dominant. In high school the comments from boys towards girls interested in such pursuits can deter them. Having a space free of that, at least until they've developed the motivation to continue, is important. As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding. All of this swings both ways,…

> As a high school CS teacher, I've seen how boys can be towards girls interested in coding. I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!). > All of this swings both ways, of course, and men are deterred from positions like elementary school teacher, nursing, and secretary roles. It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare p…

> I'm surprised. I was expecting the opposite (boys wanting more girls in the classroom!).

I think they probably want to be around girls, but most boys are social morons at that age. There is also the element of them being able to get in cheap shots to impress their friends. They don't really think of the consequences.

> It's interesting that there's an acknowledgement that we need more male nurses (from healthcare professionals) and male elementary school teachers (from experts in the field) and yet there are zero initiatives to do so.

Agreed, especially on the school front, as I think it's important for kids in schools to have a range of influences during their early years.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#152

Post by IX-103 »

tonguez wrote: post #71
travisd wrote: post #5

I have opinions™, but mostly agree with this article. Most intro coding classes and course materials read more like a glossary than a lesson. This contributes (rather directly) to the failure to retain a diverse student base in intro CS program. We've gotten a lot better at recruiting CS students from underrepresented groups (women and BIPOC chiefly), but numbers drop off quickly[1]. Studies in math education have sh…

Yes, I remember back in the day the girls would always try to come into the computer lab to play video games. My friends and I were always like, "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!" Then they left. The girls wanted to learn how to code so badly, but we wouldn't let them. My friends and I were getting lots of sexual attention from women, but we thought that was boring, and preferred to spend our time alone on computers. The girl…

Interesting that you felt the need to sexualize the girls who were interested in computers.

They are people, not objects for your pleasure. If your comment even remotely reflects your attitude towards them, then you might as well have been telling them "GET OUT! WE HATE WOMEN!".

Do you think that maybe if you treated them like people and welcomed them to the group with patient explanations, expecting nothing, they might have hung around?

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#153

Post by MonaroVXR »

WalterBright wrote: post #120
bob1029 wrote: post #17

I have always struggled with how to advise my friends & family on this path of learning. It seems like everyone wants to be a WFH developer these days, but I don't know how to enable them to succeed on that path. "Go build something you want to build!" is something I keep reiterating (as does this article). But most don't seem to be interested in that for whatever reason (presumably because its fucking hard). Maybe I…

It's like exercise. Everyone wants to be fit, but very few are willing to put out the sustained effort to get fit. There are no shortcuts, either. You can't pretend to be fit, you can't buy it.

That's exactly how I feel too.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#154

Post by pxtail »

dfdz wrote: post #107

> Why? Because none of these chapters answer the most important question a reader has, the entire time, WHY!? Why is all this important and what problems does it solve? When should I use this thing that I learned? When I was an undergrad taking an advanced class about probability theory, I asked my professor for help understanding the bigger picture. I could solve each of the problem sets, but I couldn’t see the bigg…

I observed in myself that when learning new programming language/framework/concept I usually need to force myself through first few chapters even though I may not necessarily understand why. This understanding usually happens later when multiple of basic concepts are in place, absorbed and together help to grasp bigger picture which leads to understanding smaller elements.

While this seems to be working decently I'm not sure if it's only because I became accustomed to this, allegedly wrong method of teaching - not only teaching 'how to code' as this method of teaching is default one in all kinds of school books.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#155

Post by ljm »

moonchrome wrote: post #134
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #77

My approach is to employ folks with enthusiasm. If they're teachable, they'll figure out whatever pile of tools they get thrown into on the first task. Then they'll have some skills and the next task will seem less daunting. Of course some mentoring is useful. But just the stuff that's pertinent to the task at hand; concrete help that gets them moving forward. Because, somebody is paying for results. And because prod…

Have you actually been through this before ? I ask because my experience wasn't the same so I'm interested in other perspectives. One experience that jumps to mind right away - a few years back I was in charge of mentoring a group of interns. The thinkering/enthusiastic guy was smart and reminded me of myself at that stage - but I was a terrible employee at that point and it took a lot of failing to get productive, a…

It sounds a bit like you got things the wrong way around. The guy who reminded you of yourself needed more mentoring, and the other guy was doing just fine.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#156

Post by IX-103 »

exolymph wrote: post #133
Der_Einzige wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this GPT-3? It looks like it is.

It's a parody of the ridiculous notion that geeky men try to keep women out of their hobbies. Reality is that geeky men are practically gagging for women to share their interests.

It's well documented that the behavior of geeky men discourages women who are interested in such hobbies and fields, so I'm not sure that it is entirely ridiculous for some people to assume that is intentional.

I at least try to never ascribe to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence. Geeks are not known for their social skills. Their reclusiveness and cliquishness limits their ability to learn social skills from their more skilled peers, instead trying to learn from each other, like the blind leading the blind. Combine that with hormones and even more limited experience dealing with women as people and you get them either trying to one-up each other in some of the sort of dick measuring contests they use as social dominance displays or using patronizing gestures to treat women as if they were children.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#157

Post by Tainnor »

dfdz wrote: post #107

> Why? Because none of these chapters answer the most important question a reader has, the entire time, WHY!? Why is all this important and what problems does it solve? When should I use this thing that I learned? When I was an undergrad taking an advanced class about probability theory, I asked my professor for help understanding the bigger picture. I could solve each of the problem sets, but I couldn’t see the bigg…

Yes, I think there are two things which are simultaneously true:

- We (as a society) often teach in not necessarily the most effective way, or at least a way that might be a bit ineffective for a number of students.

- Some people get obsessed with "the best way to learn something" and never actually start doing the learning. I'm learning Japanese atm, and the amount of people you find online who obsess about the best method of learning instead of spending that time just working through a textbook (or whatever), is staggering.

It's good that you mention probability theory, because maths is really a field where I've felt that it's totally normal to feel like a complete idiot the first time you read something.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#158

Post by majormajor »

WalterBright wrote: post #149
majormajor wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've got that backward. I think parent poster is complaining about teaching methods where the belief is that "answering questions" -> "mastery." "Grade-driven teaching" here refers more to the "all we're gonna do is give you homework and a test." It's like industrialization of teaching - no mentoring or individual conversation, just tests and reading material. When you've got 1 teacher and 20-40 kids, it's…

I've forgotten the material from many courses I've taken. But I've also discovered that the knowledge quickly returns if I retake a course on the same material, far quicker than it took the first time. The knowledge is still there, it just needs some WD-40 to break it loose again. And yes, doing column buckling problem sets in college enabled me to size the jackscrew for the 757, as it was a column buckling problem.

I don't know anything about column buckling, but if you'd cranked out a bunch of column buckling problem sets and not paid any attention to when/where it would be applicable, would it still have helped you later? If you had forgotten the exact technique, would you have been able to check a reference book anyway?

Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C?

(The flip side of this is folks I've worked with who will immediately say "this is the Command Pattern" or such and jump to writing a bunch of code that either is massive overkill and/or just breaks down when the real world introduces some edge cases.)

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#159

Post by istjohn »

asleepawake wrote: post #42
__mharrison__ wrote: post #19

(Disclosure: I do corporate training (Python and Data Science) for a living.) I generally don't teach coding to newbies, so a lot of the coding I teach is correcting poor mental models and teaching features (somewhat) unique (or different) in Python. My best Pandas courses have been when the client opts to use their data for the course (instead of my canned data). The students are already subject matter experts with…

Having a good mental model of a language seems like one of the fastest ways to be more productive in that language. Do you have any recommended resources for developing a strong mental model of python? For reference, Dan Abramov’s course JustJavascript [1] provides an amazing mental model of JavaScript, and Josh Comeau’s css for js developers [2] course provides an amazing model for understanding css. I have 5+ years…

There is a truly excellent series of lectures on YouTube from a college course on the Python interpreter internals. But I can't for the life of me find it. One resource I can recommend though is pythontutor.com. It's a tool that will step through your code snippet and show how the code maps onto the internal representation.

Re: Teaching how to code is broken

#160

Post by protomyth »

meristohm wrote: post #113
erwincoumans wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, learning is much easier if you have motivation. How do you motivate kids, if they rather play games rather than coding (and they even ignore in-game scripted coding such ad Minecraft or Roblox coding)?

My feeling, from ~eight years as a mostly-highschool math and science teacher plus parenting as my main work these last few years, is that this motivation to learn is best established very early on, hence my support for universal birth-to-three support (I’m in the USA) in the interest of minimizing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs/trauma) and teaching parents how to cultivate a growth mindset. Intrinsic motivation…

One of the other places birth-to-three programs pay for themselves is to catch physical (e.g. hearing) problems early. That allow for correction and minimizes the affects in learning, reducing cost in later schooling.
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