Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
1–10 of 42 posts
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#2I taught myself programming last year (starting with Python from Google's course) and am incredibly jealous of this. I'd have killed for someone to explain what on earth Object Oriented Programming was in the context of the project I was working on. It simply did not make sense to me for a very long time.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#3I'm curious as to see how much he charged for the lessons.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#4Taught myself to program over 6 years ago. I've learned low level and high level languages, algorithms, data structures, how to make websites and mobile applications, etc, etc. While I may have wished for an instructor at parts (specifically when my computer refused to run certain pieces of software, or when I accidentally wiped my entire hard drive while trying to install linux) in retrospect, I don't think I would choose to do it any other way.
Then again, I prefer learning from reading a book than from being taught. Everyone is different. It must be amazing to have someone guide you and check up on you once in a while though.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#5I taught myself programming last year (starting with Python from Google's course) and am incredibly jealous of this. I'd have killed for someone to explain what on earth Object Oriented Programming was in the context of the project I was working on. It simply did not make sense to me for a very long time.
I'm curious; what was the first project you built on your own?
It's been so long since I started programming that I can't really remember mine. My wife is learning now and I sometimes worry that my gauge of what are good beginner projects is off.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#6Essentially this is where I am - I've completed about 1/4 of codecademy's codeyear, and I'm digging into Arduino pretty well (hello self-driving trash can). Codecademy covered the basic concepts well, but I'd like to make sure there aren't any concepts I'm missing. If I'm doing something the hard way, I'd like someone with more experience to tell me.
I've already got a BA in business, and while repaying college loans, I really can't afford to pay for college classes to be able to meet with a professor. Besides, I'm not sure that college courses would teach me electronics and programming faster than I can teach myself. (College was a good experience, but I'm not trying to get another BA)
I'd almost like to start a service connecting interested learners with subject-matter mentors. In fact, some type of mentorship/tutoring program could be an integral part of a good hackerspace.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#7I went through a very similar process and I highly recommend it. I'm a web designer and I had a bit of experience with Javascript (just enough to be dangerous) but I really wanted to build an actual web application. I just couldn't seem to grasp OOP, but in hindsight it's because Javascript's OOP is so obfuscated.
I live in a small tourist town and I was surprised to find a local Ruby developer. We met up and I asked him to tutor me a couple of hours per week trying to build an actual Ruby on Rails application.
He set up the project structure and wrote a couple of tests, and I'd go back home and try to get those tests to green. Boy it was hard. I'd grind for days trying to get the last couple of tests to pass, so when we'd meet up for our weekly session he'd resolve them in just a couple of minutes and it made perfect sense. It was worth it just for those "ah ha!" moments.
Of course, the motivation isn't in learning the language/framework itself, it's in building something useful or meaningful to you.
In the end, with 2-3 hours of weekly mentoring, I was able to release the functional application in six months and learned tons in the process.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#8I taught myself programming last year (starting with Python from Google's course) and am incredibly jealous of this. I'd have killed for someone to explain what on earth Object Oriented Programming was in the context of the project I was working on. It simply did not make sense to me for a very long time.
I'm curious; what was the first project you built on your own? It's been so long since I started programming that I can't really remember mine. My wife is learning now and I sometimes worry that my gauge of what are good beginner projects is off.
Well, I still remember my first projects:
* a console hangman game
* a weird ascii art animation program
* a "guess the animal" program that used a binary tree of yes/no questions to guess the animal the player thought of. if it failed, it asked for a question that could be used to distinguish the wrong guess from the right one, and appended it to the binary tree (which was stored on disk)
I thought those were such a big deal back then :) Oh, the good old times :)
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#9I am in a similar situation to the author: I am an experienced programmer, and I am tutoring my wife, who left her job so she could devote all her time to learning to code. She's gone through all of the HTML, CSS, and JS CodeAcademy courses, and is now doing the Python course on Udacity.
While she hasn't needed a lot of help with those, she has also been working on extracurricular projects that I've helped put together for her. This is where I think the article was most revealing: I have been worried about helping too much, but now I can see why the opposite is true.
The author mentions that struggling with what you're learning is important. I agree. However, I think I have been letting my student struggle with the wrong things in the name of not "doing it all for her". I think it would be better to err on the side of providing every resource I can to define a straight path to a completed project. When she gets comfortable at a certain level, we can make the projects more complicated by involving more parts, rather than more frustrating by giving her less information.
Re: Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
#10Essentially this is where I am - I've completed about 1/4 of codecademy's codeyear, and I'm digging into Arduino pretty well (hello self-driving trash can). Codecademy covered the basic concepts well, but I'd like to make sure there aren't any concepts I'm missing. If I'm doing something the hard way, I'd like someone with more experience to tell me. I've already got a BA in business, and while repaying college loans…
Not sure if this is a feasible where you live, but there are a lot of "code with other coders" meetups in SF and NYC. If you come with a programming sticking point, there are fresh eyes that can help you though it. I like codeacademy, but find its structure limiting; you can literally just go through courses parroting off information without learning best practices or antipatterns.