Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

Ok, sorry for misspeaking, but I don't think it changes the conclusion. I don't know how to measure consistency in my example, but correctness necessarily implies consistency.

> primary math education (i.e. young children) isn't personalized very much. This is demonstrably true, at least in the U.S.

I would say that it is demonstrably not true in many EU countries. Maybe "non personalisation" is the tendency of lazy teachers, but I remember pretty well how my math teachers repeated the same subject thrice: the first time describing its core in an abstract way, the second time with concrete examples (apples and pears) and the third time in very little incremental steps. The first explanation was for naturally able math learner, the second for those how needed practical examples and the third for less able pupils. Some of us complained about the fact that it was a boring way to teach (and you know how horrible bored kids can be in the class) but I'd say it was worth it to have all my classmates learning more or less at the same pace with nobody left behind.

Actually, I complain more about the fact that we had to change math teachers so many times because of educational reforms and budget cuts/reorganizations.

Nice idea, but to what extent has it been implemented? Hard to find info on that. And in my own experience, differentiated instruction within the context of traditional mixed-ability, set-pace classroom instruction is still relatively weak.

Further, why be an ass and post a lmgtfy link when the op is clearly not aware of the term to google. You see the contradiction there I'm sure. Next time just post a link to the search results.

> Experiments going back to the 1980s with teaching children how to program using Lego blocks and robots with Logo seem to indicate that nearly everyone can learn how to program, but possibly not when they’re 18 or 19 and possibly not with the kind of academic environment represented by the test.

I only learned how to program at around age 20 or 21, but at that point I had already been a CS student for 2 years, and of course had failed most of the actual programming-related classes (even though I had earned a A+ in calculus, with congratulations from the professor). I am now a professional programmer, I'm in my early 30s, and as such I'll quickly write down my thoughts on this, maybe it helps someone make some sense of it.

Now, about the particular example in the article, I can still remember the first programming class during my first semester at Uni. I can still remember about how baffled I was when seeing almost the exact same code as in the above article, I was wondering to myself: "assignment works left to right, is the only natural way, what do you mean now "a has the value of b"? You first write down a, the 'equal' sign, and then b, it's only normal that b, coming at the end, takes the value of a". And so on. Someone also mentioned the "competitive" nature of a CS-class, which is 100% spot-on. I had never owned a computer during high-school, while some of the my then-colleagues had been programming for 10 years already, and because of that I was afraid to ask questions or even to ask for help from my colleagues.

And in case you're wondering how did I finally became a programmer, well, it was thanks to Python. At first I started writing some ugly scripts in PHP, but after 6 months I stumbled upon Python. I don't know exactly why, but it's something about this language that makes it very easy for non-programmers to grasp programming language concepts. After one year of doing Python I finally had the balls to try and take my most difficult programming class again. I got an A (the class was taught using the C programming language), with the professor surprised about how had I managed to do that.

I worked as a TA at my university for a while (under-grad TA too ... was a blast, me and the prof got along really well, and I knew the material extremely well and could teach) and the hump mentioned is true. I once used to believe that everyone could learn how to program, if you can write down steps for making toast in the morning you know how to program, but some people just couldn't get it.

There was some mental disconnect that didn't allow them to grasp certain key features required for programming. No matter how you explain it to them, no matter how you tried to change the model to help them. I spent a lot of time with the professor I was TA'ing for trying to understand why, trying to understand what we were missing that could help these students understand. Stuff like scope, pointers, references were some of the difficult topics, which to me come almost naturally they felt it hard to wrap their brains around.

There were students that didn't get it but they could fake the knowledge required and could get the end result but not understand why that was the end result. They did okay on the programming questions, but when it came to knowledge of what was going on they couldn't explain it.

I felt terrible having to fail students, I felt even more terrible when I could see on their face that they had tried their absolute best. I don't think I could go into teaching unless I taught uper-level classes so that I didn't have to deal with the great disappointment and filtering of students. The look on a students face as he was sitting in my office during TA hours and he still wasn't able to grasp the concept of pointers made me feel really sad. I don't think I can deal with that again.