If HN believes creative thinking is a waste of time I’ll get downvoted for this but I fancy just letting my imagination go wild so here goes... Video gamers can supposedly differentiate between tones more similar to one another than non-gamers. Perhaps, if you made a theme of very similar colors, you could achieve the same benefit from programming. Although I suspect it might not work because the difference in the co…
You might find graphical programming languages like LabVIEW interesting; here's a little tutorial that shows what LabVIEW programs look like: http://www.ee.buffalo.edu/faculty/paololiu/edtech/roaldi/tut... "Wires" that carry values are color-coded according to their contents (integers are blue, floating point values are orange, booleans are green, etc.). Loops like FOR and WHILE are actual "loops" that encircle the r…
Looking at a program from the scope of functions, it looks pretty unremarkable, but when you scope out to view the scale of functions you can start to make out the flow of control, etc. Even farther out, you can visually see separations of concerns that the student has implicitly created by the arrangement of the code. It was really remarkable viewing the architecture from 10,000 feet like that.
It redefined how I viewed liberal arts students.