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What We've Learned About Teaching Code

codecademy.com

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Re: What We've Learned About Teaching Code

#41

Post by xsmasher »

karpathy wrote: post #17
jgmmo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obvious, and they should have known. In my experience the best people to educate the newbies are the people who were newbies a year ago. They know what the roadblocks were for them, and the don't know 'too much' as to complicate things.

It's funny because education is actually is backwards here. You're supposed to want to be taught by an expert in the field.

There's a problem that comes up there - anyone on the bleeding edge of a field is full of distracting trivia about edge cases and theories that is simply too much for a beginner to grasp.

If the expert has enough "intellectual empathy" to put themselves in noob shoes then they can still teach well. However, if they can't state without reservation that 1+1=2 then they are no good for beginners.

I used to say "the following statement is a lie, but it's true enough for today." If a (usually advanced) student asked me what that means I'd go into the details, but you need to lay out a solid skeleton before you can start hanging irrelevancies on it.

Re: What We've Learned About Teaching Code

#42

Post by aerie9 »

apsurd wrote: post #13

Since I know the codecademy team is always listening, I'll share my feedback through supporting my two friends through codecademy: Firstly they love it. The game mechanics and the reward cycle is a great motivation for them. I think nobody can argue that you've found a great way to get TONS of people to enjoy "learning to program". The second part is a bit tricky... are they really learning to program? IMO the proble…

Thanks for contributing your friends' experience learning programming.

I am a programmer-in-learning too, and when I first signed up for CodeYear, I really enjoyed going through the first few sections and was amazed I was going that fast. Then I stopped for a few weeks because things got busy, and when I returned I found that nothing had stuck. So I had to go skim through the beginning tutorials again and got a little bit farther. Now it's been a couple of weeks, and I remember nothing. So, I conclude, it's not really working as well as I thought it was.

I am coming at this with knowledge of VBA, so I am guessing the helpful thing would be to find the comparable code in Java, then attempt to fill in the missing blanks and begin building up to the more difficult concepts from there. But I have no clue how to do that.

Re: What We've Learned About Teaching Code

#43

Post by Laner »

Interesing to read this and all the replies. And it got me thinking. Part of what has been a great learning experience for me is the "detective work" that I had to do to understand why. That involved a lot of googling, but it paid of and made me more hungry for knowledge. And when I try to code things on my own it has helped me to survive the debugging. So perhaps part of the problem also is the student. When did we start expecting that one webpage would gives all the answers?

Re: What We've Learned About Teaching Code

#44

Post by rikramer »

slaundy wrote: post #40
rikramer wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Sasha, As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, I'm aggressively working through the courses and have found it immensely helpful. A couple of suggestions: 1) It would be great to highlight on the site some success stories as these develop. I'm learning a lot but my concern is how translatable my learnings will ultimately be to developing real products. It would be great to see the outputs created by people that hav…

These are excellent ideas! We certainly want users to be able to use what they have learned into real products. Send me an email—would love to hear about what you're building. sasha at codecademy.com

Well I'm not building anything yet except my skills and confidence. I'll be sure to reach out once I do get to the stages of building products. Cheers.

Re: What We've Learned About Teaching Code

#45

Post by adambrod »

I agree 100%. Codecademy is great way to learn the syntax and some of the best practices. I agree their is a gap in understanding what your doing.

I went through Stanford's Programming Methodologies on iTunes U (free!), and they go over a lot more of the why, as well as decomposition and other stuff.

What if Codecademy had short video/audio lectures after each section that would show more of a recap of how/why it works?

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