Tavern on the Meta

12:10 AM

stackoverflow.blog/2021/01/12/…

This is silly. The real way to teach kids to program is to stick an old school home computer in front of them with a BASIC ROM, like a Spectrum or Commodore.

10 PRINT "I am a programmer now!"
20 GO TO 10

Also anyone who calls it "coding" instead of "programming" probably uses global variables for everything and can't even optimize a switch statement.

Rob

12:29 AM

A trailing semicolon on line 10 and a couple of spaces after the exclamation mark would look better.

The forest of Reinstate Monica

heh

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

12:43 AM

@TheforestofReinstateMonica As someone with actual experience teaching children programming, you need to spark the interest first, before you can go into actual programming.

As a kid, I probably would have never gotten interested in real programming without the toys I had when I was really young, the programmable toy truck and the Lego Mindstorms set.

The forest of Reinstate Monica

@SonictheCuriouserHedgehog That was pretty much my veiled point. The kids who don't have it in them will be bored, and those with programming in their blood will love it.

The interest gets sparked because you want to be able to play games, and to do that, you need to know at least a very trivial amount of BASIC.

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

@TheforestofReinstateMonica Point is, I'd have never realized it was in my blood had it not been for those toys.

It was right after Lego Mindstorms that I asked for something more...technical, and at that point my parents got me my first "true" robot set (i.e. not a kid's toy)

A BASIC Stamp-based robot, that is

The forest of Reinstate Monica

I taught my daughter programming just by saying "hey, let's teach you how to use computers", essentially, so I suppose there are many ways to do it, but pushing it on kids by giving them crappy apps that teach really poor skills is counterproductive.

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

So, then give them better toys that teach better skills

The forest of Reinstate Monica

That's what Speccy is for. :P

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

12:48 AM

...but are still child-oriented

The forest of Reinstate Monica

And there's the problem. It shouldn't be child-oriented, but it shouldn't be too advanced.

If it's child-oriented, it'll dumb things down.

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

Even today, Lego Mindstorms is still a good starting point.

The forest of Reinstate Monica

"Here's an assembler and a book on the x86 ISA. Go make something." and "Hey let's play with drawings and flashy blocks like the c0derz do!" are not the only two possibilities.

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

Nov 11 '20 at 20:00, by Sonic the K-Day Hedgehog

At age 6 I had my first exposure, with a little toy truck that had four "routine" blocks you could position on it to make it perform specific things (move forward, turn, dump contents out, etc.). I wasn't about to count it, but considering most "learn to program for kids" tools today are just like that, I'd count it.

The forest of Reinstate Monica

Today's tools are even more dumbed down, especially the "apps".

Sonic the Curiouser Hedgehog

12:51 AM

In case I wasn't clear, these types of things are for sparking the initial interest, not for actually teaching

The forest of Reinstate Monica

But I do agree that Lego Mindstorms is a great way to get kids interested.

Journeyman Geek

@TheforestofReinstateMonica the former sounds like how bean dad would teach his kids to write software 😁

The forest of Reinstate Monica

@SonictheCuriouserHedgehog Sadly Scratch is specifically about teaching (bad) techniques.

@JourneymanGeek I helped my daughter dive straight into C, after only a little shell scripting.

Not quite x86 assembly, of course, but at least it's a real language.

Journeyman Geek

C was my first attempted language.... And well I still can't write anything 🤣

The forest of Reinstate Monica

TI-BASIC was mine.

Terrible, terrible language, it was.

But this was back in a time before mobile phones and "apps".

Back when people had to learn something real if they wanted to feel like they knew something.

The forest of Reinstate Monica

1:22 AM

You know, one thing that I keep wondering is why there isn't more emphasis on teaching kids other computer-related skills, like system administration or even basic information security.

Especially since those are very useful for protecting people against bad actors on the internet.

"Stranger danger" was nearly as useless as DARE, but what we really do need is scam/malware awareness. There's a reason so many kids have pwnt boxes.

Tech Expert Wizard

2:05 AM

@TheforestofReinstateMonica Yeah, that's a really good idea...

That is, if someone'll ever attempt to do it.

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