11–20 of 50 posts
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I don't see it mentioned and I am bit surprised, but teaching kids how to breakdown "common" tasks into instructions. No programming language needed. Then, introducing edge cases. I remember a programmer making a video about their child writing instructions to "make p&j" sandwich. Did you check if you have PB? What happens if you don't? Did you put the bread down first? Or are you applying PB to the counter.
What's a peanut butter and jelly and sandwich (the result)? It's a slice of bread atop a layer of peanut butter atop a layer of jelly atop a slice of bread. Recursively define each part, for instance defining a layer of jelly in terms of manipulated blobs of jelly. Reverse the order of the definitions if using an early-binding language.
(setq p&j-sandwich '(bread-slice peanut-butter-layer jelly-layer bread-slice))
;; TODO work out why jelly layer isn't transferred to sandwich in one piece
(setq bread-slice (with-tool bread-knife (slice bread-loaf)))
(setq jelly-layer (with-tool table-knife (spread jelly-blob)))
...
I love these suggestions, especially the card game and making their own website. I had my first real dev job when my son was born and I gave how to teach him code / reading / math a lot of thought. I tried speak and spells, workbooks, little toy pretend computers that had math games etc. In the end just giving him a raspberry pi with ubuntu, a big kids keyboard and no mouse seems to have been all he ever needs / want…
When kids have the mental faculties advanced enough to learn computer programming, you teach them just like you teach algebra.
I love these suggestions, especially the card game and making their own website. I had my first real dev job when my son was born and I gave how to teach him code / reading / math a lot of thought. I tried speak and spells, workbooks, little toy pretend computers that had math games etc. In the end just giving him a raspberry pi with ubuntu, a big kids keyboard and no mouse seems to have been all he ever needs / want…
he's a kid, es supposed to care more about that than anything else.
It is a programming language and a web-based environment which "grows with the user". In the beginning, you can only ask for a user input, print it out (optionally prepending some string) and do very simple turtle graphics (with only right angles). Then new concepts are introduced gradually (variables, lists, loops, conditionals etc.). In the end you have a functional subset of Python.
Also, there are quite a few premade exercises/miniprojects to explore.
Note: I'm neither the author or a contributor of Hedy, I've just learned about it and found it interesting.
We don't need to make everything kid friendly. There were no fun algebra games, you just did the work. You didn't even understand why the work was useful, you just had to do it. When kids have the mental faculties advanced enough to learn computer programming, you teach them just like you teach algebra.
We don't need to make everything kid friendly. There were no fun algebra games, you just did the work. You didn't even understand why the work was useful, you just had to do it. When kids have the mental faculties advanced enough to learn computer programming, you teach them just like you teach algebra.
There are many different paths to the same goal. Some kids are maybe better off just picking up C documentation and going straight for it. Some are better starting with some web based gamified psuedo language.