How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]

https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9800-how_to_teach_programming_to_your_loved_ones

by n-izem • 7 years ago

158 44 7 years ago

media.ccc.de

gabrielshaad• 7 years ago

Step 1: You don't.

jackallis• 7 years ago

amend step1: before teaching, make sure they shave their hair.

dang• 7 years ago

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

airstrike2• 7 years ago

Even if you do, probably not in Racket and German at the same time

detaro2• 7 years ago

How dare someone use resources in their native language as an example.

BossingAround• 7 years ago

That's my experience. I wanted to teach programming to my SO, because I know she's extremely intelligent and she could do programming quite well. She just had a mental block, and never got it past the second week of the (Coursera) class, when she had to program something small and felt extremely stupid for not knowing how to do it.

I remember going through the same when I was studying programming though. Some people get over it, others don't. That's ok.

detaro2• 7 years ago

That's quite a different statement than "don't", isn't it?

tvanantwerp• 7 years ago

The mental blocks can be totally unrelated to the difficulty of the concepts, too.

My wife is also smart and totally capable of learning to program. I've seen her self-learn subjects (e.g., how email headers work or basic SQL queries) just to scratch a particular itch, though she didn't think of it as learning a technical skill.

But she'll never bother learning to program, because she's "not a tech person". It all goes back to her being a young girl in school and having one bad computer teacher who made her feel stupid and inadequate. She's completely averse to "learning to program". Her block to learning is entirely emotional, acquired from a stressful event.

BlackjackCF• 7 years ago

Agreed.

I think everyone should have a broad understanding of the purpose of programming and what it can achieve.

Not everyone needs to learn to program. Some people just don't like it and won't have the knack for it.

nicoburns• 7 years ago

Yes, or at least make sure that they actually want to learn before going down that path.

crispyambulance• 7 years ago

Yeah, if someone _wants_ to learn it and you're able to teach it-- why not!

The complication is that teaching something is a very different and separate skill than being able to "do it".

Professional programmers ESPECIALLY have A LOT of trouble with pedagogy. You can see their profound dysfunction in this area if you spend time in stackoverflow. It makes me feel sorry for people that get into there the first time, totally unaware of the weird culture that awaits them.

kyleperik2• 7 years ago

This is true. It comes down to two things I think that go hand in hand

1. Do they have enough persistance to learn and then tackle problems 2. Do they even care?

Most people just aren't wired that way and it's nice enough if you find someone who's even willing to listen to you talk about technical things

CobrastanJorji2• 7 years ago

I agree that we shouldn't force programming down the throats of loved ones that aren't interested in our careers and hobbies.

However, I strongly disagree with the popular notion that most people "just aren't wired that way" and can't learn to program. Certainly some people take to it much more quickly than average, but dismissing everyone else as doomed to never be able to comprehend the cosmic complexity of a while loop because their brains are fundamentally less than ours is kind of terrible.

mrspeaker• 7 years ago

A talk entitled "How to teach programming to your loved ones: Enabling students over example-driven teaching" and you reply "Step 1: You don't"... that's pretty harsh. How would you say the author should have approached it instead?

gshrikant• 7 years ago

I don't think that's harsh for the title of the video as posted on HN. Like many others interested in programming, I've tried teaching it to my loved ones and come back with the understanding they either they don't need to or they don't care. A lot of programmers I know tend to assume that other people need to know this stuff or that it is important to their lives somehow which is a narrow view of the world to say the least. My girlfriend might listen to me talk about programming but assuming that she needs to be brought into the fold _somehow_ feels selfish to me. Again this is all subjective and anecdotal. I'm sure the talk would be useful to someone who knows someone who is interested and is just looking for the best way to teach them.

avip2• 7 years ago

It's harsh because it's true. There's no reason to teach love one's coding. In fact, there's no reason to teach them anything that does not resonate with them naturally.

alexanderdmitri• 7 years ago

There's a really good article in the top ten on Lawyer News right now: How to Teach Your Loved Ones to Perform Legal Research.

A lot of the advice could be applied here pretty well.

jniedrauer• 7 years ago

No one taught me to code. I realize that this is not true for everyone, but for me, it is difficult to comprehend "being taught how to code." What does that even mean? Learning to code is synonymous with reading documentation and then implementing it. Do it a lot and you get quicker at it. Do it enough, and you memorize the standard library. Congrats, you know how to code. It's an entirely self-driven process.

I have helped engineers get up to speed on new tech more quickly than they otherwise would have. But that's not really teaching a skill. It's more like cutting down their search time for information a little bit. It would be completely useless if they didn't already know how to use documentation.

Software engineering, on the other hand, is something that can be taught.

jeena• 7 years ago

I never considered memorizing the standard library having anything to do with coding. Same as memorizing where the books in a real library are to have anything to do with being able to read.

Learning to code for me is learning the concepts like variable, loop, if, map, reduce, oop, sequence, array, function, return, lambda, monad, state, side effects, etc.

Once you understand this, it doesn't matter what language and libraries get thrown at you, you'll be able to work with it. The rest you can read up in the documentation, and over time, as you say, you'll not need to look as much because you memorize it. But in my opinion that's just optimization after you learn coding.

barrystaes• 7 years ago

No one taught me to code.

As a kid i learned to code using an old book i found, with a computer but no compiler:

I simply had not figured out that EDIT.COM was not QuickBasic. Looks the same but had no Run menu... if only somebody told me! As a kid i could use a teacher.. as a knowledgebase to query, not necessarily as a teacher.

It was fun to run what i wrote before, once i figured that out though.

Not much later i found out how to delete files..

nxrabl• 7 years ago

The title of the talk is a bit misleading, since it's really all about teaching young people in a classroom setting with assignments and credit. Which happens to be very relevant to me personally right now, but doesn't at all help if what you want to do is get your nana to provide more enlightening diagnostic feedback with her tech problems.

This talk does seem to confirm a lot of the things I've suspected about teaching tech, specifically that vocabulary has to come first, to give students the language to describe what they want and the problems they're having, and to give them the mental hooks to hang concepts and practice from.

henrik_w• 7 years ago

I taught my son and his class (grade 8 at the time) a bit of Python programming during several weeks about a year ago. It went surprisingly well. I concentrated on basic concepts: variables, statements in sequence, conditionals and loops. I've written it up here:

https://henrikwarne.com/2017/12/17/programming-for-grade-8/

Lerc• 7 years ago

I have half an idea for a children's book that I may one day write called "Teach your parents to code" targeted at a child and a parent where neither of them can code. The idea is that you put the child in the driver's seat making them motivated to help their parents. At the same time, they have to learn the concepts in order to explain them. In explaining the concepts to an adult they not only self review what they have learned, but the adult can also review and catch misconceptions.

CobrastanJorji2• 7 years ago

I listened to Amy Bruckman give a talk about LambdaMOO some years back. She mentioned that kids frequently took much better to physical object-oriented metaphors than adults did. They might say things like "I don't understand why adults can't understand that a dog is-a animal, but a house has-a dog in it."

I think it's a great idea for a book. Send me a PM when it's published and I'll buy one :)

yeahitslikethat• 7 years ago

Its brilliant. I hope he writes it.

There's a riddle that little kids get right away but Harvard grads hardly ever get.

What's greater than God. Meaner than the devil. Poor people have it. And if you eat it you will die?

DenisM• 7 years ago

You will be interested to know that Brett Victor wrote a tutorial on lambda calculus for preschoolers. [1]

Also, I have a lambda-calculus ballet production in my head, but since I know nothing about ballet I can't really put it down to paper or make a production. Not that it helps you any, but I think it's a fun idea to ponder.

[1] http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/

tossaccount123• 7 years ago

The best you can really do is point them in the right direction and help them when they get stuck, but learning to code really requires motivation that only they can provide

geniium• 7 years ago

For the French speaker there is this amazing book named "Genie du code" that will teach you how to code : https://geniesducode.com.

Have a look, their project is amazing and the drawings are fun!

codazoda• 7 years ago

I recently started a little series of zines where the idea is to learn programming by creating art. It's a little akin to a puzzle or paint by numbers. Each issue is a type-in that produces an image on a JavaScript canvas. I hope that it teaches programming in the same way I learned from books and magazines in the 80's. Check it out at: https://splashofcode.com

toomanybeersies2• 7 years ago

Why would you want to?

I have no desire to teach calculus to my loved ones, or chemistry.

On the other hand, I do have an interest in teaching technology literacy to my loved ones. How to avoid falling for phishing scams, how to find information you need on the internet, how to make a spreadsheet to plan for things, how to write a resume using a word processor. People are lacking such fundamental tech skills that teaching them how to code should be the last thing on our mind.

How to teach programming to your loved ones [video]

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