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Comment by plg | Hacker News Reader

I took my kid to one of these last year. It was fairly useless. They drag around little action-icons into a list to make an animated character move around and do stuff. My 11-year-old was bored stiff.

Edit: PS the Apple Store employee who ran this thing (he was a very nice guy) admitted he had zero coding experience himself

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When I was a kid I learned programming by going to the library and borrowing books on programming. This was, of course, before the days of the Internet where you can use google to find those resources. My biggest challenge was trying to find the tools I needed, i.e. a C/C++ compiler, PASCAL interpreter, assembler for my Commodore 64, because it wasn't like I could go on the internet and download them, and there were fewer free open source tools that I could get my hands on. So I would have to had the money to buy them, as well as find a store were I could purchase them because it wasn't like I could go online and order them.

Anyway, the point I want to make is that I was a pretty self motivated learner, I didn't need someone telling me what to do, but it would have been nice to have the resources I needed, and an "expert" I could go to who could help me when I had questions or didn't understand something.

I wonder how the change in scarcity of resources will affect people's relationship with these subjects. Similar to yourself I grew up in an environment when information and software was hard to come by and thus highly prized. Books read beginning to end, games played to completion (often repeatedly), things like programming tutorials from print magazines completed then picked apart over several hours.

Part of me worries that making it all easily available will actually kill off kid's interests in subjects/skill sets that require some level of devotion before you see real rewards.

I think that the easier, and more affordable, access to these resources is absolutely beneficial. It is hard to say how many more people get into the field (and stay) because of it versus not having it.

I also don't believe it would alter or diminish someone's internal self-motivation to learn. Actually, it would only serve to fuel the urge since there are always greater and greater challenges once you are making some progress and learning beyond the basics.

If you're looking for something a bit more advanced, but still not jumping right into the deep end check out our iPad app hyperPad (https://www.hyperpad.com). We never intended it for teaching kids to code, but schools and teachers from the around the world love it for introducing younger kids to code.

It has a lot of the the coding principles applied in a visual even driven environment making it fun and easy to create cool interactive games.

We're also working on adding other cool things like HTTP requests and sockets so users can connect to servers to send/receive data.

Would you agree your then 11 yo (12 now?) may have been more advanced than this course catered to?

Maybe some 8-9 year olds who don't have parents with a programming background would be more the target market.

Was the programming language Scratch[0]? Because Scratch is flippin' awesome. My 8-year-old programs a new game in it every week, without prompting or coaching from me. They're getting progressively more sophisticated, with variables, loops, and everything.

And yet his first exposure to it was dragging little icons into a list to make an animated character move... which is exactly the right material for a 90-minute course presumably designed for total neophytes.

[0] https://scratch.mit.edu/

It will be interesting to see if Swift Playgrounds on iPad changes the landscape here.

Simple intro courses, but it's got real Swift compiler + runtime, and you can call straight into all the native APIs if you jump out of the guided tour.

With the recent Game Center APIs for live streaming, you can apparently do live streaming of Swift Playgrounds on services like Twitch as well.

Might be nothing, but opens up a lot of possibilities for people just getting started.

That's how the Harvard CS50 course starts (using Scratch).

The Harvard CS50 course was redesigned because the previous version appealed to much to condescending people like GP who had no patience for classes that teach beginners.

Sounds about what I expected. If there's anything kids hate, it's being patronized.

Yes, given the level of competence of the staff at Apple stores, it seems unlikely there could be a worthwhile coding camp at that venue. Apple would need to bring in some much higher caliber people.

Urgh, it is basics of coding course for 8 year olds. What do people expect? Albert Einstein giving lessons?

In my experience, 8 year olds often ask more penetrating questions than adults. If they take an interest in understanding something, they often desire to understand it on the deepest level possible for them - quickly exceeding the capacity of their parent or teacher to explain (unless the adult is a 'renaissance person'). (Edit: or a competent teacher with adequate training relevant to the subject)

If the 8 year olds are really encouraged to explore and ask questions (vs 'jump through these hoops, follow instructions), the staff at apple will most likely be unable to answer their questions.

Have you ever met 8 year olds? Care to give some examples of "more penetrating questions"?

In elementary school we had philosophy classes, some got filmed for a documentary about it. It's all in french though, but I remember some very existential questions got asked (mostly once we got slightly older, I remember discussing life and death as well as suicide). Obviously we had never been taught anything about fallacies and critical thinking in general, but the simple exercise of open minded dialogue was pretty great for forming curious kids and we asked ourselves pretty deep questions.

Maybe jshevek means that they tend to ask "why" type questions which can be difficult to answer, as opposed to "how" type questions which are less difficult to answer.

Yes. The way that children use "why", it can mean "with what motive" but also "by what mechanism" or even "which events necessarily precede that" depending on context.

I would say that most adults are often simply unable to answer those questions because they just don't know. Children are naturally curious to levels which exceed the average adults ability to answer. Even educators are often inadequate to the task, if the question falls out of their areas of study. Some educators try to condition their students to focus on the limited prescribed domain of 'material they are to learn' and not ask questions that cross outside of that domain - in part to avoid acknowledging their ignorance.

But I would go further and say that children often also ask perfectly reasonable questions beginning with "how" and "what if" which stump adults. You can see this very readily when the topic is anything related to the natural world, as most adults are ignorant of basic science.

> Urgh, it is basics of coding course for 8 year olds. What do people expect?

Teaching neophytes (and, especially, neophytes who are also children) the basics of anything -- especially in ways that will engage them and not leave them both without knowledge and with less interest than when they encountered the teaching -- takes nontrivial knowledge of both the subject field and teaching methods.

No, but I'd imagine that they would expect a competent instructor to be leading the class.

These books used to be used by children:

http://www.atariarchives.org/

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/books.html

So if 8 year olds could grasp Basic, Z80 and 6502 Assembly, I guess adults in a computer shop should know their stuff.

I don't speak German and I already know Swift but I'd go to see that!

It'd be nice if they made an area available for random mall-goers who are also software engineers to come voluntarily hang out and instruct / help out random kids or teens that stop by, with potential for networking or further tutoring services for those really interested or who want to do something more interesting. Unfortunately I bet if a lot of us just camped out unofficially for a couple hours we'd be branded as child predators or something, and escorted out by mall security in any case...

Which is really unfortunate. Because most adults are really, really nice. But if they express any interest in helping kids they are assumed to have a nefarious motive.

These aces are called schools and community centers and they welcome volunteers

A professional programmer isn't likely to work for whatever Apple is willing to pay to teach classes it isn't charging money for. Programmers who want to teach are probably charging a lot of money for it, or volunteering to teach through nonprofits rather than through Apple.

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