Coding for Kids Is Not Just Another Fad
livetechnoid.com
livetechnoid.com
And then discussions like these are almost exclusively held by the minority who excelled.
I hate to sound so crass but you're either cut out for it or you're not... People get shoved into STEM/tech/whatever because it has good career prospects without ever considering the nuance of what makes children/people successful in this.
Frankly, most people won't even wrap their head around simple conditional logic/algebra. I say "won't" because in my experience they're fully capable, they just put in minimal effort to get past the exercises. I end up having to pace my entire instruction to those kids when I find them in my groups. It's worth noting that I'm in the US where this is sorta an unspoken social contract for getting through school: keep your head down and show minimal effort + don't make waves and you'll be passed right along without a problem (usually with good grades). Thankfully, I'm doing after-school program stuff and the kids want to be there; but, you'd be surprised at how many kids are there because their parents are forcibly bolstering college apps with extra-curriculars (gross).
Sorry to wander a bit there... My main point is that regardless of whatever ideals we would like to hold not everyone is cut out for highly technical work, especially coding. Hopefully I don't come off as too much of a curmudgeon!
What do you mean by this? I've met people who struggled with for-loops, but most people have been able to get if-then statements.
So many of those kids didn't want to be there, and couldn't be bothered to just wrap their heads around if-then logic, or storing a value to a variable... simple, simple stuff. They were capable, and we'd do true/false tables on paper etc. to talk about how their LEGO "vending machine" or whatever should work but it was pulling teeth and over 50% of the groups never finished outside of physical assembly.
I got a real respect for teachers at that point and realized that so much of your work is sinking time into keeping kids who could give two-s#&ts less "on the rails" vs. actually mentoring a kid who has real interest/potential in the subject matter. I believe what I experienced is a common experience for educators =(
But my whole original "won't" bit spells it out pretty clear... to rephrase: I'll venture to say almost all of those kids were capable, they just "won't" while trying to manipulate you to do all the thinking for them. "Welllll can't you just give me the next line Mr. folkhack.....? I just don't knowwww......" with puppy eyes sorta crap.
Ninja edit: It's worth noting that general school population sorta stuff is where you get the above anecdote, vs. extra-curricular 90% of the kids want to be there which makes it night-and-day. I will never do a "general school population" thing ever again after learning I'm legit not cut out for it.
> I've given the same tests to my students 3 times - word for word and many students still failed. The good students who cared raised their scores with each repeat. The non-nonchalant students sometimes, managed to score less.
I was sorta shoe-horned into super-mediocre Midwestern colleges here in America due to my mother working at a private institution in the same city that I grew up in. I went for art and computer science... outside of a couple of exceptions the professors were horrible, and the student body even worse being a dumping grounds for rich Illinois suburbs that thought their kids couldn't/wouldn't get in trouble in small town Iowa.
My point is - I can relate. So many of these kids are disenfranchised for some reason or another and I'm more empathetic to it because I couldn't haven given two s$@ts in college myself - there was zero value vs busting my butt on professional/personal programming projects. Like - teaching us Pascal in 2005 claiming "it's coming back" lacking of value. "Software isn't going to the internet" sorta lacking...
I even had to "snap back" for some courses like my elective electronics course. The prof really cared, and wanted to give you a solid understanding of the basics. He even threw out a poor test class-wide and redid a week of instruction once because, "mathematically that was on me, I'm sorry." Somehow it was way easier for me to put forth 100% effort in his class where I couldn't be bothered elsewhere. He gave me an actual reason to be there/care.
Overall I got burnt out on education, dropped out for a dev career that led to people calling me all sorts of "engineer" titles and learned in the school of the hard-knocks. Frankly, I sincerely feel apologetic to my past professors because I was dead-weight in their classroom just going through the minimal motions to GTFO to my real job which actually paid bills vs. putting me into debt. Just like the students failing the same test three times over: I could sincerely not have cared less... When a prof said I should chose between school and work expecting me to obviously choose school, I laughed in her face and dropped out the next day on general principal. I had a mom home going through chemo, my dad was long dead, my brother was an alcoholic, and I had bills.
Definitely playing devil's advocate here, but... I imagine so many of these kids, for some reason or another, are burnt-out on education just like I was/am. I was just lucky by the time I was burnt out that I "had an out".
But there were people I was tutoring who didn't what a graph was, didn't know how to solve an equation, etc. I'll try but I really can't get you through statistics and economics with some level of elementary school arithmetic.
This was a particularly bad case but one can read any of a number of first year MBA books in a similar vein: The math is killing me.
I think if the power of a computer is put at your fingertips and you don't want to dig deeper, or see what else you're capable of creating, that's just how it is. I don't think it's any different from how some people never get into sports. It's fine to introduce kids to it and I'm sure it'll take with some of them, but there's no need to force it any more than you would with any other field.
I'd rather it stay as far away from any official syllabus as possible, there's enough to focus on as regards reforming the existing broken system.
What grade does your wife teach? My oldest sons are 7 and 5. They love Roblox. I found Codakids which has tutorials created for kids, where they can create their own Roblox game or Minecraft mod. We created a simple Obby.
Very easy to follow instructions, step-by-step. They were very excited.
https://codakid.com/roblox-coding/
P.S. Just a happy customer - nothing more.
Right now computer science is the "hot" college major, but we don't teach it at the K-12 level in any consistent fashion, resulting in a sort of digital divide. We expect kids to find out if they're really going to thrive as computer science majors by loaning them a bunch of money and putting them through CS 101.
And it doesn't mean they have to become CS majors. There's been lots of discussion of the difference between programming and computer science. Learning to code early, for those with the aptitude, would benefit students in virtually any discipline. It changed my life, though I became a math and physics major.
As a career path only a few would care at a young age.
To try to sell it as a skillset to young people as a way of simply not being a casualty of automation is a tough sell especially before they've had the chance to enter the workforce and bounce around from gig to gig.
It's not hard to sell older people. Especially if they've lost a lot of jobs and opportunities recently. Many of them are desperate and hungry for new opportunities.
But for young people, to a lot of them this is just no different than another type of Math class.
The best experience I've had so far is just creating simple games and simulations in Processing (P5JS) with kids. The online IDE is very forgiving. But as of yet, I don't think there is really a set of instructions that allow them to think like a Computer Scientist. In many aspects, 1980s style Turtle Graphics and DOS BASIC were more advanced "mind-openers"
This is exactly what turtle logo does, with the modest, easily definable, straight-forward goal of drawing cool pictures. I think one of the big mistakes we're making with kids is telling them "you can build awesome video games with almost no work". Well, a video game to my kids is Zelda or Halo. Nobody is building those games over an afternoon in scratch. Coding may be easier, but it's still hard work.
I remember one of my first little qbasic programs could output colors on the screen with different tones as it changed. It was probably 10 or 15 lines of code and hitting that key to run the program on a loop was like a little drug high. I was hooked and I could see the endless possibilities of what I could create by just modifying what I already had on screen.
Had my first foray into programming been a terminal and a book about C, I most definitely wouldn't have stuck with it.
Some educators take this too far and make kids feel like they're getting a watered-down version. It's a fine line between math-style instruction and gamified block coding.
It turned out to be a written test and with the exception of some basics, it was mostly snippets of C code and then multiple choice responses that describe what the code did. Or the reverse where you would select a snippet of code.
I remember that I felt like I had guessed on every one of them. In some cases, I was able to make an educated guess by ruling out the obvious. But many times a total guess.
I spoke to an older kid after the test and expressed how difficult I thought the test was. He and a few others said they thought it was easy.
I ended up winning first place.
A university had put on that competition. That experience factored in a bit on my decision to not study computer science in college and go the economics/finance/business route instead. Even though I knew my path was likely tech.
In middle school one of my friends installed the shareware version of Doom onto several computers and the teacher had no idea how to uninstall it. So we were able to play it when she wasn't looking. In high school, my QBasic teacher left half way through the semester to check herself into a mental institution, and the school's follow up course, introduction to C++, was cancelled since only 4 people signed up. There just wasn't good instruction, and I think that led to there being lower interest. However, I only have my own data points to go by.
He didn't want the stress of moving to a city and programming for others. That was 20 years ago though. It might be different now.
There are some people who love teaching enough to make that trade off, and it’s wonderful that they exist, but they’re going to be exceptionally rare.
Disagree - at least in my experience in urban school districts, they were definitely the majority of good teachers.
I'm sure some of this is real, but the "programming teacher" in the local town is a former industry developer who moved to teaching after having children so that the work schedule worked for raising children.
And people happy to teach can be unhappy and unsuccessful programmers (due to finding corporate programming unsatisfying and unmotivating)
And it doesn't take a computer science degree to teach coding, just as it doesn't take one to learn it. My mom taught programming at the high school and college level for several years during the 1980s, and her degree is in chemistry.
Two things we don't know how to teach are: Coding and teaching. What I mean is there's no sure fire way to turn more than about 10% of any group into coders or teachers. Even mathematical ability isn't necessarily a good predictor of coding ability. So the good coders and teachers actually come out of the same pool.
In high school, I took 3 programming courses.
Did programming for kids go away and come back?
Instead our computer education was focused on typing skills and microsoft office. I'm not sure what people are learning today. I was working with an undergrad recently, and had to teach him how to copy text from a log file and paste it into a notepad file and save it. The kid had no clue what to do, because he was raised on mobile devices which doesn't really have a concept of text files. Computer literacy has fallen by the wayside in education, and the writing has been on the wall for at least two decades now.
I wonder if it was more regional or which school system you were in? I started stuff in 5th grade in the early 80s on a TI99.
The thing is it seems everyone even then wanted in on it. But not everyone could do it. Even fewer liked it. I do not see how that has changed much either. I ran a class for programmers a few years ago. By the 10th class they had all dropped out due to a lack of time and interest. I took and taught the class because I found the topic interesting. They seemed to only want in if it gave them some sort of advancement in their job. It would have if they had stuck it out. But it became 'too hard'.
I'm skeptical of teaching CS to kids because I'm not sure we know how to teach it to college students. As far as I can tell, we have a strict divide between people who can write code and people who can breathe code. And the people who breathe code rarely, if ever, learn from their courses as much as from themselves.
I suppose exposing more kids earlier will get them to start teaching themselves, but perhaps we can do it outside of a classroom format. I'm imagining a more free system where kids can explore a variety of activities, some of which are programming influenced. Like a set chunk of computer time with some programming options, some writing options, some film options, etc. Digital Montessori, so to speak.
If nothing else, this seems like a reason for it. I’d add:
“It encourages precise thinking.”
(Which is nearly the “computational” thinking in OP, but IMO different)
This is especially useful as geometry proofs are no longer taught in the standard geometry classes in US high schools.
That's not a detail I've heard from my math teacher friends, but other things have convinced me that I'll be teaching my own children math separately from what their school covers (general delays in certain topics, such as long division, basic algebra, and other things getting pushed back 1-3 grade levels versus even 10 years ago).
You can easily publish music, video, writing, but not working and ready to use software project.
I recently read A Mathematician's Lament and it gave me pause to consider if my approach to teaching could be changed.
I think a better goal would be to teach kids to think on their own. They need something that keeps them interested and curious.
Making these habits sustainable is more important initially. You’ll lose a generation of kids if you start them on raw CS.
Something to think about, because ultimately we want more people that get into it because they really wanna make games or apps, vs the current reality of ‘hey this field pays and others don’t’. But this is the ideal we want for all disciplines.
A good simple game engine would do wonders for programming education.
Take something like React, not exactly a learners platform either.
We never really build apis like that anymore (or ever have it seems), where we literally ask ‘could a kid do this?’.
It is good to attract kids to at first, but not so great after.
Also, just because someone enjoys playing games does not imply he has any motivation to quite code for game. People mostly fall love with visuals or story or online competition. Which leads to drawing, modeling and writing or level design more.
Disagree. The problem is that everyone learns differently and has different home lives that create learning hurdles. There is no intelligence barrier for individuals, it’s more an interest barrier.
That's not my experience at all. My Mom taught me algebra at home when I was in elementary school, years before algebra is generally taught. I struggled a lot and did have the discomfort you mentioned. That instantly went away when schools started teaching algebra and I discovered that I already learned everything and can do the exercises so much faster and better than my classmates. I was already pretty confident but it was another confidence boost.