91–100 of 102 posts
When I was at school I never really saw the tools intended to get kids interested in CS work out. In fact, many of my classmates began to hate programming because of the Python coursework we had to do. (terrible language choice for classes by the way, because beginners don’t understand how to indent their code and Python is unforgiving in this regard.)
I am trying to get my son to learn Python using Carol Vorderman's book.
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Absolutely agreed. I had a trash-80 in the early 80s and used to copy BASIC from magazines, and then in the mid 90s I bought a book with a CD in it that taught me how to set up perl-based e-commerce store, which I set up for my mom's retail shop. Neither of those got me interested in programming. The event in my life that got me there was around 2000, when I bought a Cold Fusion 4 book off of a street vendor - litera…
I always love hearing from other people who started with computers by typing in basic from magazines. For me it was a TI 99/4a and typing in code got me completely hooked on programming. Whether it was a game, a 4 bit cpu simulator of some sort (memories are vague) or a word search solver didn’t matter. It all felt magical. Logo did nothing for me. It never gave me that sense of satisfaction that I got from writing i…
I think it's the same story as with Snap Circuits for learning electronics, or baking soda + citric acid "chemistry sets". Many parents really wanted their kids to have a STEM career, and so we lowered the bar to the point where STEM-shaped educational activities are accessible to any kid. But because there's no bar to entry, playing with these toys doesn't reliably translate into motivation to really learn electroni…
>That motivation still manifests only in a small percentage of kids. Maybe we're making that percentage go up slightly, but it's a small effect. Yeah its not exactly predictable. I know very few people in my high school who even attempted technology careers, and all of them from my year who tried, other than myself and one other, went in with scholarships. And all of them, left when the scholarship money ended. Its l…
I didn't even get a computer I could mess with until I was like 15. We had a family pc for maybe 6 months in the 90s and I played like, magic school bus, lol.
I really started programming in HS when someone showed me what a function was, that was an epiphany moment. Before that I just liked to build computers and servers; I was hosting HTML sites from our house in 7th grade I think? But still not programming.
I also wish I listed to some rando telling me the money was in C++. I did PHP for too long.
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>That motivation still manifests only in a small percentage of kids. Maybe we're making that percentage go up slightly, but it's a small effect. Yeah its not exactly predictable. I know very few people in my high school who even attempted technology careers, and all of them from my year who tried, other than myself and one other, went in with scholarships. And all of them, left when the scholarship money ended. Its l…
My impression of Australia (as an American who is living in New Zealand) is that there isn't the same financial benefit to working as a software engineer vs other careers as there is in the US, and there isn't the same stigma towards the trades.
But yeah we push out a lot of engineers, just mostly Mining, Electrical, Structural. Much fewer software engineers.
I was a naysayer before I had kids, too. I now am able to get a first person view of Scratch usage through my child who likes the platform very much. What's missing in a lot of these discussions about Scratch efficacy is the community aspect. Kids like getting a response in the comments section from their peers and many of the alternatives proposed don't have that. Without an active community, a lot of kids might nev…
I think it is a decent programming paradigm but really just teach 6502 binary code entered by flipping switches and blinking lights and let only the children who love it go on to learn programming and computer science.
It's not always your first exposure that you later identify as a catalyst. I'm an American that took a C++ class in Europe when I was 13 (forward thinking school in retrospect). But when asked, I usually say scripting RS bots was what got me into the field, because I had fun and it was more memorable. But would I have chosen to do that had I no idea what coding was? Maybe not...
> people who started with computers by typing "in basic from magazines."
I recall "typing in" Palo Alto Tiny Basic from Dr. Dobbs,in 8080 assembly code.
Unless I wrote or typed in code to read a paper tape of said code that I got from who knows where, but not from a dumpster.
Or both.
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Snap Circuits are just ingredients - or a way to develop fine motor skills with something that is entertaining for a parent. You wire them up to something else then blow their mind by programming an ESP32 to be a switch with a touchscreen.
If the parent knows electronics, that's already a pretty good predictor that the kid will learn it too. But in the absence of that, the kit itself doesn't teach much. The instructions don't really explain the circuits, they just show you how to put together colorful blocks.
“Why??!” doesn’t come in a bottle, and that’s the X factor here.
When I was at school I never really saw the tools intended to get kids interested in CS work out. In fact, many of my classmates began to hate programming because of the Python coursework we had to do. (terrible language choice for classes by the way, because beginners don’t understand how to indent their code and Python is unforgiving in this regard.)
What would you choose instead? I am trying to get my son to learn Python using Carol Vorderman's book.