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Comment by camel_Snake | Hacker News Reader

I've been priming my nieces on how computers operate by playing a simple game with them. I pretend to be a robot and they give me instructions. When they say 'turn left' I keep rotating until they tell me to stop or do something else. When they say 'sit down' I just sit wherever I am, even if there's a chair right behind me.

They think I'm just being silly and we all have a laugh but they're getting the hang of it!

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A teacher I had in ≈ fourth grade did this with our class. We had to make a PB&J sandwich. It was entertaining, and like your example, he pushed us to give the same amount of precision in our answers, all while having some fun.

We did this too, but I have no idea why, because we weren't learning programming. It's probably the only thing I specifically remember about 6th grade. Maybe it was to teach us to be just as precise in our homework or something.

I love this.

"Be precise." It's something we take for granted as engineers. A lot of people don't understand the importance of exact instructions and algorithms, expecting the other party to intuit the desired meaning of a command. I think this is a clever way to teach kids early on.

Yes, that is exactly what the many teachers who are teaching coding to young kids in schools are doing. First, you get them to understand the idea of a series of instructions by doing it in real life. You can cover quite a bit of the fundamentals of programming without even talking about computers. Algorithms, logic, sequences, loops... these are all explainable by having kids direct each other around a room.

Once they understand the concepts, THEN show them how to make them happen on a computer.

Wow I've been doing EXACTLY the same game with my daughters! They have to tell me to go and stop and turn and stop, and if they don't say stop I walk into a wall and they laugh and laugh. Lots of fun.

That sounds like a great way to illustrate imperative vs declarative as well:

    camel_Snake.sit()
    BoneFractureError: coccyx

    SIT DOWN;
    Exception of type 'Room.OutOfChairsException' was thrown

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