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So, don't just learn to code, learn to solve problems? Well, duh. There's at least two sides to this. CS comes down to code and it's a prerequisite to computational problem solving, most of the time. Problem solving OTOH is like language, it's expected to be learned by doing. Code is the simpler, formalized of the two topics.

I'd rather have not every step of development guided by institution, just in case the methods are maybe just a little bit flawed. Maybe, just in case. Arguably, learning problem solving is a problem to be solved, so it seems almost impossible to teach, anyway.

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>> While I enjoy tackling these exercises (and have devoted my academic career to doing so), most people don't, further raising the barrier for learning to code.

My formal background is computer science, so somehow I can resonate with the author. My 1st programming language is C, though, not Scheme/Lisp. Damn I hate messing with pointers :D

So, what is the best (most feasible) way to teach non-CS folks to program, then?

I would argue some important concepts to understand are.

- programming is commanding a machine to do what they want.

- computers speak a non-english language so everything they write is translated before the machine follows it

- a machine is only limited to its hardware. You cannot save without a harddrive, you cannot communicate without an antenna of somesort.

Instructing a machine can come in a variety of forms

- Robotics - commands reinterpreted into physical movement

- User Experience - commands reinterpreted to produce graphics or sound

- Logical - Encoding and decoding, list management and prediction, mapping commands to actions, language grammer

If anyone disagrees or has more to add, let me know

I observe that programmers must be understood: If they can program, they can make the computer do what they want, at least some of the time.

If they are good at programming, they will do this quickly, and in a way that the computer does not have to do any (or many) unnecessary steps.

However I also observe a programmer must understand: If they can program, they can understand the computer, at least in some circumstances and at some level.

If they are good at programming, they will also be good at understanding others.

I believe mathematics teaches people to understand by helping them recognise when they do not yet understand.

To know when you have convinced someone, and yourself have been convinced, is clearly not exclusive to mathematics: Writers, artists, lawyers and lobbyists, all specifically develop these two kinds of understanding, and it is this line of thinking I am currently exploring.

I appreciate this sentiment. Correct me if Im wrong but you are implying, if an individual understands how to command something or do a task, they have a realization of how the bigger picture works to some extent. I agree with this from a personal perspective. Are you interviewing individuals/doing this scientifically or is this a personal theory you test when given the opportunity?

> Correct me if Im wrong but you are implying, if an individual understands how to command something or do a task, they have a realization of how the bigger picture works to some extent.

No: I am not trying to say someone knows how to program if they can program.

In fact, I suspect strongly the opposite: Most people who can program do not have any idea how they program, let alone how to program.

I am saying there are at least two essential skills which are "programming", and not just the one you brought up.

There are more: One must also have a command of the grammar and syntax, but I find that despite how much time people spend on it, this speaks more about how complex languages are, than it does about programming[1], and so I did not bring it up.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9122299

> Are you interviewing individuals/doing this scientifically or is this a personal theory you test when given the opportunity?

I'm a professional and not an academic, and yet a big part of my role is to grow programmers, so it's a little more than a personal theory, but a lot less than a study.

Games, and game modding, seems to be the most accessible and most successful gateway drug to programming. Games that have decent mod support can offer a natural skill progression, without overwhelming all at once. Start by tweaking some data; move on to basic scripting. Eventually, you start to chafe against the limitations of the game's modding abilities, and want to start building your own thing.

This whole process is grounded in something real, and something that is more fun than crunching numbers or building a fake CRUD app.

I'm curious about the spate of games that directly incorporate programming. Maybe they have been more effective than I think, but for the most part, they just aren't really that fun, IMHO. They lean too hard towards the edu, and not enough toward the tainment... Particularly in comparison to, say, building a custom StarCraft map with triggers and conditions or a Quake level, that you can go play with your friends after.

I grew up making starvraft maps and warcraft 3 maps. Allowed me to believe in myself and grow a thick skin

I'll second games being a great gateway drug.

My first introduction to programming was game development. Around early 2007, Bungie ( the game studio that made Halo ) released a bunch of devcasts in which a handful of the developers would all sit around, shoot the shit, and talk about building the game. I naturally thought it was awesome and looked for tutorials on Youtube. Unfortunately I didn't stick with it due to the steep learning curve and decided software development was too hard ( If only I had a mentor/teacher at the time ).

A few years later though my friend and I wanted to bot the game Runescape to make some money. The most ban-proof way at the time was to use this program called Simba and you wrote scripts with a pasacal-like language. Everything was based on the pixel color of something and most of the bots were simple procedural programs. Due to the simple nature of the scripts, you could easily write something without a ton of prerequisite knowledge and see if it worked or not. The biggest problem with this method was color and object detection, how do you know if what you're clicking on is a tree or some grass? At the time, the hotshots in the community were mostly people enrolled in cs programs and building neat algorithms to detect stuff. The only way to compete with them was to learn the fundamentals of cs. so of course that's exactly what I did!

Gaming provides a fantastic playground for learning because it's fun and there are very clear rewards for learning more ( Learn matrix manipulation, get better object detection, make more gold ). I think teachers would do well by getting games into the classroom. They really do open the imagination when paired with programming.

I'm not convinced computer science curriculums are teaching even "CS-folks" to code; I have observed people come to university already knowing how to code, or possessing whatever it is that allows them to code.

I just got a phone call from a friend in his last quarter at a top 10 uni last night - he was stressed out because his research group hadn't actually written any code yet. It was all copy pasted from other projects.

They ran into some issues, and have no idea how the code base works and can't fix it. I think (on my experience) schools teach you syntax, and lots of history. Not much application.

> what is the best (most feasible) way to teach non-CS folks to program

Teach them CS first.

Start with the history. Make a connection from maths to CS - Logic. Show that representation is meaning. The Code is only an abstraction but it is the only way to communicate the abstract ideas, never mind there's different forms of code. Try to code to understand complexity, that the complexity is the reason that "Programming" is bigger than school. I don't mean run-time complexity, but that is an important bit.

The code is just one of the real-world applications of programming, it's secondary to problem solving, but useful enough at that. It's well enough defined in the mathematical sense to be taught as a formally structured, rigorous generality (Theory). It's highly developed and abstract enough to go a long way with intuition applied to immediate problems (Practice). Recurse, apply code to code. Dont' forget the disciplined mantras: RTFM, KISS DRY ...

Preferably it shouldn't even be a single class. Just like everyone has to learn about numbers, matter, elements or cells, it should be important to teach logic as the very basis on the search for boolean truth. Tie in self modifying code with evolution.

Instead of just introducing calculators in math, introduce python, Matlab, R, all of them at appropriate times. As a prime example of applied CS that's relevant to about any teenager with a smartphone, explain the graph theory that they are the data in.

It all depends on the children being on an appropriate level already when they enter elementary school. That depends on the knowledge of the previous generation. Therefore it's a slow progress, that picks up every iteration. There generally isn't a one size fits all program to teach programming, it depends on individual parameters. The ideal OTOH is very narrow minded and far from optimal, given many more pressing needs. Biology is booming, isn't it? Should we ask the same question in Bio, how to teach non-Bio folks to do research? It's coming along, the only hindrence I see is dangerous half knowledge and knowing to much.

This is going to be so mind-numbingly boring for most people that they will check out completely.

If you make programming a math class, people will hate it just the same way they hate math.

Integrating programming in maths class would improve the maths class experience. So, pupils would love programming all the more for it.

I learned more math in shop class than I did in math class. Trig actually makes sense when you're trying to cut angles right to create a piece of furniture, or figure out how to pattern your rafters to get the right pitch on a roof.

Bringing Python or R in to graph the meaningless functions that we graphed on our TI-83s doesn't add much value - what you are doing is still pointless. If you want to teach high-school-level pre-calculus, I think the best bet would be to offer a 3D graphics course. Jamming math into people's heads without showing them why it would ever be useful is about as effective as jamming a camel through the eye of a needle. You've got to trick people into learning math.

I still think back to diagramms explaining the sinus function on the unit circle and jus have to think how much easier that would have been for the teacher to display in an animation. If that animation was a program written ahead of time that would allow for a lot more interactive exploration. Well, depends, really, watching the teacher plug in numbers is probably even more boring than the drawing, and there is something interesting about reduction of the animation to less dimensions (2D without time), should spur the imagination.

> You've got to trick people into learning math

That's the one I'm opposed to because everyone has different preferences, so this tricking is incompatible with the one to many approach in industrialized education.

On the other hand, I completely agree that the lack of application is often a drag and game-programming was my favorite application, but I did that on my own time and it wouldn't have been fun if I was mandated to do so.

Also, purity in maths is motivated by the variability of applications. Purity is an ideal, of course, but it's one about keeping it simple, which is nice.

As I was saying in the OP, the applications should be individually obvious and hence voluntary. If that could be incorporated into class, that would be great, but the reality looks different. Of course my experience is biased.

So, don't just learn to code, learn to solve problems? Well, duh.

Maybe that's not such an obvious point. I'm learning Javascript and php strictly to build new things. Solving problems and streamlining processes for other people was never a motivation in learning.

It's like saying, don't just teach the syntax, teach the semantics. It's rather obvious. The two can't be separated, because they are the same thing from two different perspectives.

Your comment doesn't make any sense. Syntax and semantics aren't the same thing. That is like saying freeway and tunnel are the same thing from a different perspective.

At least in programming, syntax is structure. A structure can have substructures. If the whole structure has a different meaning than each substructure on its own, then syntax has meaning. Vise-versa, how could you tell the structure of something that doesn't have any meaning to you? How do you know the meaning of a word without knowing the grammar and context? The context is the perspective.

I didn't come up with syntax semantics duality myself and I can't really explain it, because it's actually rather mathematical.

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