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Comment by Lerc | Hacker News Reader

The goal is admirable, but It looks to me that the government has just gone "Make it So".

This is quite a relevant issue for me because I have taught computer programming to primary school students in New Zealand. Teachers need to not only be taught how to program themselves but also how people learn programming. Which concepts are contingent on the understanding of other concepts.

Every programming teacher (myself included) that I have encountered is just someone who knows how to program muddling though best that they can.

I attended a seminar on how numeracy is taught in NZ. They have a lot of information about the order and time it takes for individual concepts to be grasped. Information from similar research on how children learn to program needs to be coalesced into a teaching plan, and teachers need to be taught that plan.

Doing this right will be a tough job. It will require resources. Probably more resources than will be provided.

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Though your intent is admirable, programming is something that can be very easily thought, and yet quite difficult to master depending on your aptitude and inclinations and personal commitment to learn. Should everyone be able to write a simple script sure, and the tools that are being developed for corporations are exactly to allow scripters to do more with simpler tools, more drag and drop stuff with a simple scripting language. But real programming is something that comes from your own efforts and endeavors. Not something in my opinion that can be taught, even by talented teachers who are programmers because the amount of time and dedication does not fit into an hour or two a day, it fits into countless hours spent trying to hone your skills out of your own personal interest and hours and hours of frustration due to it. For a self-motivated programmer all you need is on YouTube and the net. For everyone else some basic teaching is adequate to get people started down the path, the rest they can learn by trying to do.

0.) Teacher who gives up on trying to figure out how to teach more effectively won't be good.

1.) This is abut children. Their brains are not developped yet and their motivation is flicky. Pedagogy matters a lot.

The whole point is to teach them basic concepts so that they become able to learn more by themselves later on. They won't be taught modern stack, the point is to make them able to learn real stuff later on. A kid that encounters for cycle first time at university has much much harder time then the one that was even causually playing with logo.

2.) Even adults have common sumbling blocks. Having access to other people's experience - which explanation worked and in what order makes learning more effective.

> 1.) This is abut children. Their brains are not developped yet and their motivation is flicky. Pedagogy matters a lot.

Pedagogy matters for adults too. The best kind of pedagogy is pedagogical content knowledge. That is, how do you plan a lesson around the specific content you're teaching? For example, what metaphors are effective for a given topic? What are the common stumbling blocks? What classroom exercises and demos are the best?

I've taught first year programming for a few years to collage age students. I don't have data, but I'd guess the difference between an effective lesson and an ineffective lesson is somewhere around 3-4x. That is, if I teach a concept (eg, pointers) ineffectively it seems to take about 3-4 times as long for a median student to 'get it' compared to if I teach it well.

Out of a classroom of about 25 people, there will be about 5 students who are going to become great programmers no matter what I do. And about 5 students who I am convinced will never learn to program, or if they do it'll take them about 2-3x as long as everyone else to master the skill. The knowledge that the remaining 15 students walk out of my classroom with is dependant on my skill teaching programming. Practically speaking most of those students actually learn a patchwork of the things I happened to teach effectively plus whatever they learned on their own while doing assignments.

I hope its enough.

I agree. But I still think it is all more sensitive in children. They have less self control and it is easier to discourage them. As adult, I was more able to distinguish between "the topic is uninteresting" and "the class was badly taught".

Then again, children can learn by themselves when it is all framed as game they are freely exploring - adults learn much less that way.

Then there is a factor of developing brain - your students all have already brains fully developped. So it won't happen that someone does not possess abstract thinking yet, but still may suddenly click 6 month later on.

Basically, adults are more able to overcome obstacles and be independent in learning while children depend on teacher much more - both for motivation and actual content.

> best kind of pedagogy is pedagogical content knowledge

This is definitely true, but more general pedagogic stuff is also extremely useful and shouldn't be poo-poo'd! I got much better at teaching after just observing a really great classroom teacher for a while and having another great teacher observe me and comment. A pedagogy crash course also greatly improved my assessment design.

It's like math or programming or anything, really. If you want to be good, watch the greats and -- if you can -- get the greats to watch you and comment.

we're talking about young kids here though.

This is exactly why "core math" failed in the US. It's a fine system, but the teachers didn't understand it and don't know how to teach it. So it's widely seen as horrible instead.

core math is just a bad idea to begin with. I feel like it is not hard for adult to grasp but just counter-productive for kids to learn.

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