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Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

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Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#41

Post by StrauXX »

Not my son, but I did teach my younger brother programming. From when he was about 10 to when he was about 14. I started out when he was showing interest in my programming work. I ended up gifting him a book on programming for kids. Then nudging him into working on it every now and again and helping him out when he had issues. Mostly my goal was to make him motivated to learn (showing him interesting projects I had been working on, etc.). From my experience with motivation and time the skills will come themselves, without motivation, every attempt is pointless.

It was a slow burner but over the course of four years he ended up learning quite a lot. Now being one of the best programmers in his college.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#42

Post by scarecrw »

I work teaching CS to a variety of age levels (admittedly mostly teenagers and older), and one thing I would recommend is broadening your consideration about what CS fundamentals might include. Picking up language syntax or new tools is easy enough at whatever age, but problem solving and planning skills are very tough to rebuild as they grow into adolescence.

One of my personal favorite resources is CS Unplugged. [1] It sidesteps any particular language or toolset in favor of pen-and-paper interaction.

[1] https://www.csunplugged.org/

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#43

Post by exe34 »

primitivesuave wrote: post #22
dybber wrote: post #4

I have run a codeclub for 10 years. Here’s some quick thoughts: - Make them curious, if they are curious they will teach themselves. Example: don’t tell them what a for loop is, make a project where they really need it, but let them first to write it very verbosely without loops, then they will almost invent it themselves and be relived when you teach them (same style can be applied to most things) - make projects th…

These are awesome pointers. I especially agree with your first point about writing verbosely - I would do this all the time when I was teaching kids. I would copy and paste things and write all kinds of hairy logic, so they can see how useful it is to use different syntax and apply some refactoring.

I still do that at 38 - I often write something, copy-paste and edit something, and do it a few times until I figure out exactly what needs looping over. It's not always clear if you use coding as part of understanding the problem domain.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#44

Post by wslh »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #36
wslh wrote: post #3

I think it's best to start close to the goal and move into problem-solving once something is up and running and needs improvement or optimization. Focusing on CS fundamentals isn't always worthwhile, unless there's a genuine interest in computer science or math olympiad style problems. Today, we can operate at a higher level since most core algorithms are already available in libraries and frameworks. Just my two cen…

Have you used Alice recently, and if so what platform are you on? It seems to have become extremely crash-prone on recent versions of macOS, to the point that the school where I teach is planning to remove it from the curriculum next year, even though we otherwise like it a lot.

The last time was on Windows, there were more active before. I think in macOS you should play with a good Java installation support.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#45

Post by akkartik »

dybber wrote: post #4

I have run a codeclub for 10 years. Here’s some quick thoughts: - Make them curious, if they are curious they will teach themselves. Example: don’t tell them what a for loop is, make a project where they really need it, but let them first to write it very verbosely without loops, then they will almost invent it themselves and be relived when you teach them (same style can be applied to most things) - make projects th…

This is pretty much the answer.

- I made this little thing with 100 levels, each easy enough to do in 30 seconds to 2 minutes: https://akkartik.name/post/2024-10-26-devlog. My kid has zero patience for lecturing, and this is me trying to sneak through that filter.

- When you get to the end, it turns out you're pretty close to a game of Pong or Snake, and it's been interesting to see people build toward one vs the other. I've been obsessed with Snake lately, alternating between playing it and hacking on it: https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/114547652849162554

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#46

Post by scarecrw »

primitivesuave wrote: post #18

I taught kids how to code for several years, both in person and through a website that taught Python to ~500k kids. My eternal advice with teaching CS is to delay abstractions as long as possible . Teach them how to draw a circle on a canvas, then get them to move the circle to different parts of the canvas, then get them to draw multiple overlapping circles/rectangles/etc. Once you've got that down, make a bouncing…

I've been increasingly concerned by packaged CS curricula that includes an overabundance of guidance and tooling. I've seen too many students complete a course (successfully!) and leave without any ability to start building projects of their own.

I don't want to end up as a curmudgeon griping about how "back in my day we didn't have an IDE!", as I'm in favor of giving students real world tools early, but I'm worried that we're filtering out some level of independence by sandboxing their learning so strictly.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#47

Post by chili6426 »

Not a parent, I was a kid to a software developer and now I'm a software developer. I think the most important thing is nurturing curiosity. Whenever I wanted to know how something worked my dad would show me. Eventually I figured out how to learn things myself and it snowballed into the career I have now. I never felt dumb asking questions and now learning is my favorite thing to do. I was never taught to code, I figured it out myself using the curiosity my parents gave me.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#48

Post by oarsinsync »

margalabargala wrote: post #40
neilv wrote: post #24

> Knowing fundamentals is always useful, but learning to collaborate with an AI is probably the more important long-term skill. How difficult a skill is "collaborate with an AI" that it can't be picked up quickly at any time (and will be changing rapidly)? And how permanently stunted is a person who always "collaborated" and never had to think. > I’ve been focusing on fundamentals like logic, structure, and problem-s…

> And how permanently stunted is a person who always "collaborated" and never had to think. How permanently stunted are today's programmers which have always collaborated with a compiler or interpreter, and never once written or even looked at assembly?

Considering the ridiculous amount of memory and cpu very simple apps use nowadays, in large part thanks to things that enable developers to optimise for their own time, rather than compute, I think you’ve unintentionally hit the nail on the head.

Very few developers today care about resource usage and resource management. Very few developers even understand that there’s something there to care about.

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#49

Post by neilv »

margalabargala wrote: post #40
neilv wrote: post #24

> Knowing fundamentals is always useful, but learning to collaborate with an AI is probably the more important long-term skill. How difficult a skill is "collaborate with an AI" that it can't be picked up quickly at any time (and will be changing rapidly)? And how permanently stunted is a person who always "collaborated" and never had to think. > I’ve been focusing on fundamentals like logic, structure, and problem-s…

> And how permanently stunted is a person who always "collaborated" and never had to think. How permanently stunted are today's programmers which have always collaborated with a compiler or interpreter, and never once written or even looked at assembly?

That's levels of abstraction, but still thinking.

Just last night, while looking for clear technical information about MCP integration options for Gemini, I found this Google-written article[1], that -- with a positive, hype-compliant spin -- opens with:

> Have you ever had something on the tip of your tongue, but you weren’t exactly sure how to describe what’s in your mind?

> For developers, this is where "vibe coding " comes in. Vibe coding helps developers achieve their vision with models like Gemini 2.5 Pro to generate code from natural language prompts. Instead of writing every line of code, developers can now describe the desired functionality in plain language. AI translates these "vibes" into your vision.

That's not thinking.

We've even appropriated "vibe" terminology, which means something like emotional gut feel, without having to think about it. (Mostly associated with wake-and-bake stoners, who've self-imposed two-digit IQs and munchies, and who will sometimes speak in terms of "vibes", for lack of further analytic capacity.)

Recognizing that the top killer app for "AI" right now is cheating on homework, the collaborate-with-AI 'skill' is like the well-known collaborate-with-lab-partner. The lab partner who does all the work, while the slacking student learns nothing, and therefore the slacker fails the exam. (But, near-term, the slacker might scrape by with a C- for the class, due to copying the lab portion, and due to an instructor who now just wants to be rid of the hopeless student.)

[1] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/b...

Re: Ask HN: How are parents who program teaching their kids today?

#50

Post by slt2021 »

slt2021 wrote: post #12

programming can be picked up any time, rather invest time into building curiosity and basic fundamental sciences: math, physics, and micro/biology. these three fields underpin all advanced sciences

+ world history (antics, medieval, modern) and something useful and hands-on: pottery / sewing / carpentry / gardening/horticulture / basic farming.

curious kid will learn everything she needs with internet/chatgpt. Your goal is to make sure your kid is curious and not wasting time watching MrBeast or sending nudes on snapchat

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