Comment by tmsam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tmsam | Hacker News Reader

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As a former teacher, who ran a programming club at a middle school and taught an advanced 8th-grade math class included programming, I have some perspective on this. I would say, be wary of "fundamentals" and "doing things the right way." Teaching a 10 yo something optional needs to be fun, or else it won't happen.

The author of this article nails it: there's nothing quite as motivating as adding "Poop" to the title of a real web page. Also, you can Inspect Element and get what is effectively an IDE. Is JavaScript the best language? No, it's inconsistent and confusing. But, so is English, and a lot of people learn English first - because it is practical to do so.

Another option that can be useful are Google Sheets. If they are a certain type of kid, they might like logging all of their toys in a spreadsheet and finding the total of the toys and making charts. Of course, most kids will find this boring... but you can also use Google Scripts to do something like scrape a subreddit and store it in Drive [1], which could be fun.

However, why not start with Scratch, or Snap! [2]? They are powerful enough (especially Snap!, I think you can define new data types in it...) and so much less intimidating.

[1] http://ctrlq.org/code/19600-reddit-scraper-script [2] http://snap.berkeley.edu/

> Teaching a 10 yo something optional needs to be fun, or else it won't happen.

That matches my intuition. But the word "fun" brought back to my mind this epigram by Alan Perlis:

> It goes against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail and learning to be self-critical?

Unless I have completely misunderstood this epigram, I think the point is that programming, when done well, is not fun; it's work. So maybe if we try to make programming fun so we can teach it to a child, we're setting bad expectations for what it will be like if they pursue it seriously.

So I guess that means that when teaching programming to someone of any age, we do need to focus on fundamentals and the things that Perlis mentions in that epigram. Then, if a 10-year-old kid loses interest, we should just let it go.

Makes me wonder if I and other self-taught programmers of my generation (I was born in 1980) built our careers on a bad foundation. I started learning to program in BASIC on my family's home computer when I was 8 years old, because when just dabbling in BASIC, it was fun. Even tinkering with assembly language was fun. But the important thing to note is that as far as I can recall, I produced only one truly worthwhile program as a pre-teen, and that was one that a relative asked me to write. And that was a serious project, not a diversion (AFAIK, the latter is the definition of fun, as is apparent from some languages like Spanish).

As for Perlis's jab at "modern education", I suppose the take-away is that we need to teach kids early that life isn't fun, rather than trying to make everything fun for them.

"because its like English": best argument for learning javascript I've ever heard.

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