How To Train Your Robot • Hacker News Board

Re: How To Train Your Robot

#41

Post by annag42 » Tue, Apr 24, 2012, 4:37 AM UTC

felixr wrote: post #37

bootup wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you find playing the RoboRally game? Did you think you that were being taught programming, or that you were just playing a board game? Thanks.

Well, I have more than 10 years of programming experience, so I obviously did not get the feeling of being taught programming. But I think non-programmers also do not have this feeling. So people play the game, learn to program their robots and maybe don't even realize that this is actual a kind of programming. I think what people can learn from the game is how to combine simple instructions into more complex robot m…

One advantage of the "how to train your robot" activity is that abstraction can occur more than in RoboRally, such as creating repeatable subroutines (eg, turn around then say "I'm dizzy" 100 times).

Re: How To Train Your Robot

#42

Post by annag42 » Tue, Apr 24, 2012, 4:50 AM UTC

aGHz wrote: post #27

donniezazen wrote: post #23

I am still not sure why everyone should learn programming. Every few days I read about how to learn programming not to mention codecademy and other website. Is it more of a computer literacy thing or is their a huge requirement of auto-didact programmer?

You can easily compare this to literacy, the ability to control written communication. I'm sure around 1800 many people didn't understand the point, since you could always just walk up to almost everyone you'd want to communicate with. There was no way then to forecast all the implications (esp social and technological) that widespread literacy would eventually entail. Similarly, programming is the ability to control…

How insightful. I hope we can learn to integrate computer literacy topics gracefully in with other forms of communication (such as math/puzzle solving, writing/composition, the arts, and the sciences) in a way that motivates and interacts synergistically with those other topics, rather than squeezing them out as outmoded forms of only-historical relevance.

Re: How To Train Your Robot

#43

Post by annag42 » Tue, Apr 24, 2012, 4:58 AM UTC

bootup wrote: post #24

nmichala wrote: post #18

Thank you Josh for putting my work out there for all our fellow geeks to see :)

Thanks for sharing this, Josh! I absolutely agree with Nikos' approach to teaching programming young learners without using an actual code. If we teach kids the idea of programming early - it will then be much more intuitive for them to pick up the language formalities later. Because by that time, such a fundamental question as "why" is already answered in practice. In other words, the time for a real language comes…

I'm familiar with Scratch as an element of the first category; what other (meta-)programs do you recommend?

I learned some HyperCard and some Basic as a kid, but didn't get hooked until i could do useful things with shell scripting in college, which is definitely a case for category 2, or perhaps something even simpler: programs written in a plain text editor or even just on the command line itself.

The power to do things that matter is typically more motivating to girls than to boys, who will do something just because it's there (ie, why boys tend to play more video games and more girls end up in teaching and social-justice work). Just trying to provide another perspective. :)