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Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

code.org

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Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#171

Post by christiangenco »

jkeesh wrote: post #104
kamaal wrote: post #73

Hear me out. I was full for this 'teach kids how to code' thingy. But I think we have got this all wrong. Heck we don't have the right kind of tools to teach kids how to code. In fact I have now realized that you can't and should not teach kids how to code. You rather must teach them how to solve problems. Math was supposed to deal with that, but unfortunately that turned out to be complicated symbol manipulation if…

You make a lot of assumptions about how kids have to be taught coding. > I tried everything possible. Every other trick in the trade. Even tried to start with Python first and not C. > They struggle to understand where or why should you use an if/else/switch statement, or a for/do/while loop. Its difficult for them to map solution patterns to a code pattern. Its not their fault. Its ours. Better luck trying to explai…

There may be no `public static void main(String[] args)`, but there's still a lot of `();`

We can do better! Why not just `move`, `turnLeft`, `putBall`, and `takeBall`?

Better yet, camelCase is kind of weird. Why not `turn left`, `put ball`, and `take ball`?

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#172

Post by dxbydt »

kamaal wrote: post #73

Hear me out. I was full for this 'teach kids how to code' thingy. But I think we have got this all wrong. Heck we don't have the right kind of tools to teach kids how to code. In fact I have now realized that you can't and should not teach kids how to code. You rather must teach them how to solve problems. Math was supposed to deal with that, but unfortunately that turned out to be complicated symbol manipulation if…

Parent is clearly missing the forest for the trees. Lets not talk about cs for a second- say you are a mason and you want your kid in the construction business. He says- so what have you done with masonry? So you say- I built the house in the next block. I built the bathroom for the petersons...bedroom for the smiths...closet for your mommy...stepstool for your granny... this shit isn't going to fly even though you are 100% honest. It isn't about what you have done in your particular pathetic life due to circumstances peculiar to your economy. It is about what can be done. So you should take your kid to the Golden gate bridge. Sears tower. Central station. This was built by masons ! And this!! And this!!! Then you don't need to sell masonry... the kid will be starstruck and learn on his own. Kamaal chose to dispense with the pomp and ceremony and abandon razzledazzle for brass tacks. Here let me teach you C programming with preprocesser directives and predicates and for loops and pointers- I would have run for the hills! Even though I was as old as his niece, I had written some 5k loc in C purely self taught to make pixels flock...weird infatuation with cgi at that age. Because somebody had told me star wars and tron were made on a computer by people just like me- so I took that literally and ran with it. I was not a genius...just another driven kid who didn't give a flying fuck about hash include stdio and mallocs as long as he could make pixels fly. Inspire, don't preach.

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#173

Post by aidos »

doktrin wrote: post #128
interknot wrote: post #53

I am generally enthusiastic about teaching people to code. That said, I am ambivalent about the backing organization, "Code.org": Every single person on their advisory board ( http://www.code.org/about ) has a vested interest in there being more programmers competing for jobs. I feel like they are misrepresenting the nature of most programming jobs to the general public. They prey upon people's fear of unemployment a…

> My guess is that we'd still end up with legions of unemployed people that happen to be mediocre-to-awful at programming. Probably true. For all the hype around the job market today, generally speaking only talented developers find employment. The rest tend to end up in other fields or unemployed. I can only imagine what the market will look like when the talent pool expands.

Really? I've worked with enough substandard developers that are still happily employed to believe that could be the case.

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#174

Post by itsybitsycoder »

kamaal wrote: post #73

Hear me out. I was full for this 'teach kids how to code' thingy. But I think we have got this all wrong. Heck we don't have the right kind of tools to teach kids how to code. In fact I have now realized that you can't and should not teach kids how to code. You rather must teach them how to solve problems. Math was supposed to deal with that, but unfortunately that turned out to be complicated symbol manipulation if…

When I was your niece's age, RPG Maker, FKiSS and LEGO Mindstorms were all plenty of fun, and very accessible. I think a big part of the problem is that many adults aren't aware of all the options, or they turn up their noses at certain kinds of programming. Like it's somehow less valuable if the language learned is domain-specific or visual.

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#175

Post by mover »

chaz wrote: post #93
ekianjo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many ways to learn how to code, and we're constantly developing better ways to educate millions of kids Making it a compulsory part of education does not seem to be a "better" way to do it. Let's not push things that will be useless to most kids until they develop some interest for it, or for solving problems in general. Then you can bring programming as one tool to help solve issues, in a better/faster/c…

> Programming for the sake of programming has no meaning, just like we are being taught Math for the sake of Math. Education needs to be way more tangible and down-to-earth, at least for younger children. I think we're agreeing. I don't think it's useful to teach computer science at early ages, but rather using programming as a practical application of critical thinking, logic, problem solving, and mathematics. Compl…

Agree completely about Scratch. We have a love/hate relationship with it--it gets about 80% right but it isn't pretty and onboarding is a struggle. Scratch 2.0 will be coming soon with some improvements but still in Flash (!!)

The great thing about visual programming languages is that kids can focus more on the concepts and less on bugs due to syntax/typo errors. We're working on one for the iPad called Hopscotch - gethopscotch.com.

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#176

Post by meej »

seanconaty wrote: post #115

Still with the learn to code meme? In addition to all the reasons that @codinghorror raises in http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/05/please-dont-learn-t... , I have a one more to add. The altruism of it all stinks. The meme is being pushed by parties (non-profit or not) looking to gain from teaching people to program (after convincing them that they absolutely should). While it's true that learning to code is bene…

"The meme is being pushed by parties (non-profit or not) looking to gain from teaching people to program (after convincing them that they absolutely should)."

I believe Douglas Rushkoff was pushing it at least a year before any such parties existed, in his book Program or Be Programmed: http://books.google.com/books?id=SB474JCHewcC

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#177

Post by meej »

minikomi wrote: post #20
samstave wrote: post #3

We need to push two major initiatives in education: the ability to code and the ability to manage finances.

Does anyone have a suggestion as to the K&R of managing finances?

Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi's _All Your Worth_: http://books.google.com/books/about/All_Your_Worth.html?id=S...

(Yes, that's Senator Elizabeth Warren.)

The Balanced Money Formula they present in the book is the most realistic and least gimmicky financial management system I've ever encountered. The book is a quick read -- I finished in a few hours -- and when I was done I had a very clear picture of what things were putting my finances out-of-balance and what I needed to do about it.

For me, the answer was to pursue better paid work in a more affordable city. I have since achieved those goals, and as of last October I am pretty well in balance -- I still have some debt, but there is enough room in my monthly budget to both pay it down and save for the future, while at the same time having enough money for my must-have expenditures and a healthy budget for "wants". IMO the wants budget is one of the best parts of the Balanced Money Formula -- Warren and Tyagi assert that financial asceticism is counterproductive and that everyone deserves to have a wants budget, no matter their income.

There are a handful of books I've read that I consider to have changed my life, this one is ranked #2 or #3 in that list.

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#178

Post by aaronmhamilton »

The issue is that schools are not a place to learn, they're not the right place for people to actually develop skills.

Because schools suck at teaching (because they feel like glorified prisons and lack resources due to ignorance and bureaucracy) we must fix/replace schools before “teaching” kids to code, otherwise we will fail.

Also, this illusion that low-level languages like C are any less suitable for introduction than other languages is yet another barrier, I learned in assembly, and I would probably prefer to learn in C, since it's very simple, clear-cut, and consistent. No namespacing, very little context, very little syntax.

The best way to teach any skill, is to provide resources and motivation for the completion of real, practical tasks. In software we have the unique opportunity not to break anything real when we build something equally-so.

Re: Code.org – Dedicated to growing computer programming education

#179

Post by kunai »

kamaal wrote: post #73

Hear me out. I was full for this 'teach kids how to code' thingy. But I think we have got this all wrong. Heck we don't have the right kind of tools to teach kids how to code. In fact I have now realized that you can't and should not teach kids how to code. You rather must teach them how to solve problems. Math was supposed to deal with that, but unfortunately that turned out to be complicated symbol manipulation if…

Absolute hogwash.

I'm fourteen. And I code C++ and understand everything flawlessly.

If somebody isn't learning how to code (or how to do anything, really), it's either because of one of two reasons:

a) they don't want to learn how to code b) they're unintelligent

I'd say ~90% of kids fall into the former group. Coding is not something that you can just pick up a book and learn; it's something that takes time. It takes a hell of a lot of dedication, practice, and failure to master. Compare it to learning a spoken language; conventions of that language are likely different from English or whatever the learner's first language is, but the structure of the sentences, unless you're learning Hebrew or Yiddish, is more or less the same.

With coding, it's a mess. Nobody knows how to relate block structures to anything they've learned previously. It drives you insane for a while, but you warm up to it. It took me 3 years to finally understand many concepts that were presented to me in the many books, manuals, and docs that I perused throughout my learning experience.

And even then, I'm not done. New things are constantly to be learned, and everything I've learned I have to constantly apply to something else. If I want to learn to write GTK+ programs, I'll have to go back to a reference guide to see what several function calls actually mean.

Coding isn't impossible for kids to learn. While it is hard, it's not impossible. Start out with something like FBC or Scratch, and then give them more control through Python, which will guide them towards more complex languages like C/C++/Java. Anyone who starts teaching an 8th-grader how to code C/C++ with no prior experience, is frankly an idiot. Interest in coding is never ephemeral iff the learner is introduced to it properly.

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