What We've Learned About Teaching Code

Great quote—thanks for sharing it!

Since I know the codecademy team is always listening, I'll share my feedback through supporting my two friends through codecademy:

Firstly they love it. The game mechanics and the reward cycle is a great motivation for them. I think nobody can argue that you've found a great way to get TONS of people to enjoy "learning to program".

The second part is a bit tricky... are they really learning to program?

IMO the problem with all pragmatic approach is the lack of the need to understand. I know you didn't intend it, but codecademy suffers from the same tired "tutorial" approach. Users follow instructions to win the prize.

I will say codecademy is better than the tutorial approach, but it's still a tutorial.

The fundamental problem is my two friends need me to teach them how to think in code, how to conceptualize the problem, how to understand that "i am taking this problem, i am working out a solution in my brain, in english, and then i will write this solution in code" They simply do not have the capacity to do that. And they are 5 months in through codecademy.

Just yesterday my friend had the idea that when using a for loop, the loop passed all values at the same time to the nested switch statement, upon which the switch statement would evaluate ALL the variables at the same time, using whatever the hell case was the best match.

He couldn't pass the level because he did not visualize in his head that the for loop passes each value, one at time. Then it procedurely flows down, line-by-line into the switch statement... and so on.

My friends do not have pictures in their head about how code works, why it works that way, and how to use those pictures to draw their own.

They don't know how to code.

EDIT: sorry one more thing. The only lifeline they have when they get stuck (aside from asking me) is to look at the QA. I have never once seen an answer that explained the answer, nope, it was "here put this magic code in it and that way it will PASS! YAY!" And I mean answer in the sense of "why", not why does javascript require a return here instead of there, or why the "right" answer is to put this code before that code, or the strange reason you need this bracket here instead of there -- I mean why! why? really...why?

This phenomenon - of the difficulty of being able to teach something once it is obvious to you - has the rather unfortunate name - "the curse of knowledge", and it is well documented based on research in other fields too. There is a good discussion about it here : http://37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge

It's funny because education is actually is backwards here. You're supposed to want to be taught by an expert in the field.

That's not the worst thing in the world, since most pedagogy that works is of the basic format "You should know X. What should you know? Class repeats X. Good, because you should know X. Timmy, if I say Y, what do you say? Timmy repeats X. Good job Timmy, because you should know X. Susan, if I say Y, what do you say? Susan repeats X. Good job Susan, because you should know X. You should also know that if Y', X'. What should you know? Class repeats if Y' then X'. Billy, if Y', what do you know? Billy says X. Can anyone point out Billy's mistake? June does. Good job June, because if Y', X'. Billy, try it again. Billy does. Good job, Billy. What if Y instead? Billy says X. Good job Billy. Billy got the right answer because Billy knows X, except when Y', then X'. Class, what have we learned? Class repeats X and if Y', X'."

While it is true that they don't know how to code, the more specific status is that they are presently learning to code. That's not the worst thing in the world -- so am I, and I get paid for it fairly regularly.