Subject:
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Teaching kids to program (Was: Spybotics - A great disappointment)
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Sun, 21 Jul 2002 02:57:25 GMT
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Original-From:
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Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net+nospam+>
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Reply-To:
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sjbaker1@STOPSPAMairmail.net
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Viewed:
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742 times
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MiB wrote:
> well I think that is a documentation problem. Its nice to learn children to
> program - but with out the right steps it might even be a catastrof - in the
> terms of future choices.
>
> Learning children how to program is not a game, I haveself tried it - it
> requires a supportive family who understand that this might take some time.
I've been trying it too - and although I've been a programmer for 30 years
and my (11 year old) kid is in the 'gifted & talented' classes at school - doing
math three years above his age range - it's *STILL* an incredibly hard thing to do.
I have certainly been extremely supportive - and my child is certainly wildly
enthusiastic - but in my opinion, the missing skill is that of being an
educator. I'm not a good educator - and none of the teachers at my kid's
school know anything about programming.
We tried Mindstorms - but Oliver never got beyond programs like:
while ( 1 )
{
turn some motors on
wait a bit
turn one or other off again
wait a bit
turn different ones on or off
wait a bit
}
...we've both invested a lot of hours in trying to teach him that way
and it just wasn't working. He could write programs like this - but he
wasn't learning programming...if you see what I mean.
To my very great suprise, what finally worked was when Oliver broke his arm
skate-boarding and out of boredom pursuaded me to splash out $16 on an elementary
C programming book. I didn't think this would help him much - but to my great
suprise - he is stubbornly working through chapter by chapter - typing in examples
from the book into one of our (5!) Linux PC's - with me explaining the parts he
doesn't immediately understand - and giving him new (but similar) problems to try.
This is an awfully painful process for him - but his determination to learn (at
age 11) is powerful - and to my complete amazement, it's working.
I *think* that Mindstorms helped in getting his enthusiasm up - but probably
not to the same degree as the couple of years that he and I have spent building
3D computer games for Linux. Oliver had been making 3D models and other artwork
for the games - and *DESPERATELY* wanted to be able to program them himself.
> "Tim Go out and play" Can not be said. It requires enthusiastic qestions
> about the world and nature outside, and much think about - at same time you
> can not be boored.
Certainly you need enthusiastic and knowlegeable parents who are sensitive
to the rhythms of a child's play/explore/goof-off cycles - but I'm now convinced
that this is not enough. Parents need to learn to be educators.
> Or in one word - It won't be linux with out a real Linux (Linus)
> grandfather. Its the same thing here..
Well, according to Linus's autobiography, his Grandfather knew a little programming
already and they had a VIC-20 computer that you couldn't do much with *except* to
program it. At age 11 the ultra-geeky Linus was already fascinated with calculators
and good at math. He started out by typing in programs written out longhand
by his Grandfather who came from a Mainframe computer background where writing
programs onto coding forms and having other people type them in was what you did.
> (Where linus learned how to program - probably by learning how to ask qestions)
I don't think so.
It seems that Linus learned to actually write his own programs by reading the manual
and typing in pprograms from magazines. Computer magazines don't publish source listings
for simple programs anymore - so that isn't gonna work for kids of this millenium.
Linus doesn't indicate that his Grandfather actually taught him anything except
keyboard skills. What made him persist was the fact that he was something of a social
misfit - his parents are divoced, his siblings were into sports - but he wasn't - and
Finland has LONG, GLOOMY DAYS throughout the winter when a kid can get really bored.
He had little else to do but to pound that VIC 20 keyboard and teach HIMSELF by sheer
persistance.
This sounds a lot like my kid.
...But I don't think it'll work for most children.
They don't generally have the math skills, the enthusiasm or the concentration span needed
to become self-taught. IMHO, Spybotics is bad from this perspective because (just like the
Scout and the MicroScout) they do 'enough' interesting things with almost zero investment
in effort to strongly deter kids from exploring further.
On the plus side though, kids of today are practically born with keyboard skills - they
do homework using a wordprocessor and get typing lessons at school - so at least that
hurdle is removed.
What I think is needed is for schools to teach programming as a regular part of the
6th/7th grade math syllabus...but I can't imagine how we'd retrain all those teachers
in order to make that a possibility.
----------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------------
Mail : <sjbaker1@airmail.net> WorkMail: <sjbaker@link.com>
URLs : http://www.sjbaker.org
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Message has 2 Replies:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Spybotics - A great disappointment
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| well I think that is a documentation problem. Its nice to learn children to program - but with out the right steps it might even be a catastrof - in the terms of future choices. Learning children how to program is not a game, I haveself tried it - (...) (22 years ago, 20-Jul-02, to lugnet.robotics)
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