This is an issue I'm very passionate about, and I'm sure many others are too. I'd love to hear other's thoughts on how we educate the next generation and the best way to teach coding in 2012.
It takes a certain mindset to write code. Not everyone has it or is interested in it. My children couldn't care less about it and that's up to them. They'd rather be digging holes in the garden and covering things in paint. I'm not here to indoctrinate them with my own interests but to nurture their interests.
Education is fundamentally flawed on the basis that it mandates knowledge on political whim and percieved societal need rather than nurturing and developing interest. Consequentially society is filled with people doing what they are bad at and hate.
I don't farm or paint on a professional basis. I don't even do so as a hobby; although I constantly threaten to take up gardening, it seems to be one of those hobbies that hasn't stuck yet.
And yet I'm glad that, when I was a kid, people encouraged me to plant things and paint things.
Just because learning to code is societally approved doesn't mean that kids shouldn't be encouraged to practice it for fun. Trust me, if the kids decide they hate it they'll figure out how to avoid it as much as they can in the future. They're good at that.
Mind you, your attitude that you shouldn't expect your kids to take after you is a healthy one, and I don't want to discourage it. But don't take it too far. It's good that people are trying to figure out better ways to teach kids about programming.
There's a difference between forcing them to write code, and making the learning materials they need to write code readily available.
It's very possible that I may not be a programmer today if my best friend's dad hadn't pulled out an old Apple ][gs and had us hack away at it for an afternoon.
We found a demo floppy that had a BASIC programming tutorial on it, and from there I got hooked.
It takes a certain talent to write or play music, or paint, or do science. We encourage kids to try all these things, most won't pursuit them, some will. The kids choose without coercion.
How many parents encourage kids to learn how to code compared to the number of parents that encourage their children to do the above mentioned things? It is the children who decide what they want to do, it's about offering them a broader spectrum of things to choose from.
It takes a certain mindset to write code. Not everyone has it or is interested in it.
It takes a certain mindset to make a living as an author, and my kids might not have that. But I'm damned if I'll let them grow up not knowing how to read and write.
We had programming classes in high school in Romania, teaching Pascal or C. They don't really work. Some students don't understand programming. Others don't care. Only 20% of a class can actually program very simple programs by themselves. Only one or two can really understand what is going on. And sometimes they just want to do something else.
I'm Romanian, not everyone takes programming classes, very few do, only those enlisted in Mathematics-Informatics (in Romania curriculum varies greatly depending on what profile did you chose).
Indeed it has many problems. The first problem is that the Mathematics-Informatics profile in high school is considered elite, and every parent sends its children there. The effect is that the class will have the best, most intelligent students, but not necessarily the students interested in the curriculum. Neither the children or the parents know anything about the curriculum, all they know is that all the smart kids go there.
I've been in this class in one of the top-5 colleges, nation-wide. Some poll in the final year yielded 80% of the students hating both math and programming. Most preferred literature. Because of the inherent bias in Romanian education, the highest graded students will always be the ones who like liberal arts, and not the ones with a mathematical background and because of the way enlistment to high school works, these will be the ones that end in this class.
I mentioned I was in one of the top 5 classes nationwide to illustrate the second problem. Even though I was in one of the best classes, professors that taught programming were execrable, both in their talent as educators and in their talent as programmers. Incompetent is a word that's too mild to describe them. Reasons are easy to guess, high school teachers are paid poorly and anyone with any talent in CompSci will find a better job elsewhere. It's funny that the only two skilled professors that taught programming were two guys that did something completely different and only taught at high school because they enjoyed teaching and working with young students.
The third problem is that the curriculum is very abstract, way too abstract and far from reality, and very old, nothing feels like today, students are still required to write DOS applications with a DOS editor.
Math classes are no different. Only a handful of students will solve a math problem by themselves, others will just wait for teacher to show them what to do, and then repeat the procedure with hardly any understanding what is going on. The exams consist of problems that were already solved in classroom, it's enough to memorize the procedures and apply them to tasks on exams.
I agree that it takes a certain mindset to understand how to read/write code. However, simply offering it as an option in k-12 education doesn't seem like too bad an idea, so long as it is a child's choice to experience programming for themselves. Of course, the courses would definitely need to be interesting to grab a child's attention.
I know I would have loved programming in my younger years, just didn't have too much access at the time. That's at least my two cents :-)
This is something I don't quite understand. Yes, it takes a certain mindset to write code: mainly, you have to be able to convert a fuzzy process into precisely defined steps that generalizes over a range of possible inputs.
Is it something that most people really can't do? If so, that scares the hell out of me. And not because they can't write computer programs, either. My concern is, how sloppy is their thinking in general? How easily do they fall for circular arguments, or succumb to "lost purposes", where what they do no longer has any connection to their goals?
A-fricken-men. I have an allergic reaction every time I come across one of these posts about "how do I teach my kid to code." The whole sentiment strikes me as extremely myopic.
I'm all for providing exposure to a variety of things in school and at home, coding included, but we need to let our children be themselves. Give them exposure, let them taste what the world has to offer, but don't compel them to be the über-coder that you wanted to be.
Raspberry PI, installed with an editor and some programming environment, with links to (or local versions of) some good reference and good teaching system (maybe better versions of Learn Python the hard way?) and, finally, a paper notebook and pen.
