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Comment by Grieving | Hacker News Reader

Despite my extreme objections to the race/gender preference, I enjoy teaching and accepted the invitation to help out at a program like this (not this one in particular). I didn't get the idea that they were highly effective. Sessions consisted of walking them through an insanely long list of terminal commands and code snippets that were to be copied without any real understanding of what was happening. By the end the girls just looked overwhelmed and discouraged at the amount of garbage needed to create a "modern web app", which is certainly the most stupid place to start with programming. I left feeling as though I'd thoroughly destroyed what interest they may have had in the field, and never accepted another invitation.

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I've taught at an all girls event; being one myself, it was really enjoyable and we had a bunch of guys from the local python users group to lend a hand, they loved it too. It was wildly successful, leading to every single one of them to have a better understanding than they did before: that's a good metric. Perhaps the class was badly organized, there are are some good ones out there to copy from.

It feels like these programs were started by people who aren't teachers. Piano teachers don't have students who like Jazz start out by playing some whacked up complicated chord progressions, they start them out with something simple and build up to the hard stuff.

Something like Processing or some other easy and intensely audio/visual programming interface would be much better since it's made with that in mind and produces near instant feedback.

Almost all programs lack the proper positioning to follow a young person through the years.

We don't expect a summer math program to make math work for kids. At best it "stimulates" in the same way a summer-long Raspberry Pi electronics project does, but it builds no foundations. The education market has way too many of these motivational products and not enough investment in foundations.

But any program that focuses on foundations is over a year from application, and that implies that you have enough credibility to go for over a year without stakeholders demanding very concrete results. I suspect that what many people in this forum want are classes which provides a substantial accumulation of foundations over the years.

That's true. I didn't expect something that would be perfect, but this was basically someone's list of steps to make a webapp with bootstrap, pagination, slugs, and a single CRUD resource.

If you're going to start with web dev, better to teach teach plain HTML and CSS, and enough JS to make something small happen, then let them run with it and help them customize it. Something like an in-browser alarm clock would be interesting. Show them how to change the font, colors, sound, background image (maybe even a background slideshow), and some animations.

I was going to say "I'd skip all the traditional web-dev stuff and just make a little Go application that serves a web endpoint with something neat in it"... and then I stopped myself and thought about how much boiler-plate and explanations and step-by-step you'd need just to get kids compiling Hello, World... Teaching kids is hard.

Edit: i appreciate Go because there's not as much boilerplate or setup required as with some languages (unpack the tarball, set $PATH, and I'm off to the races) but even those steps mean we're talking about shells and directory trees.

You could run a bit of JavaScript right off your filesystem. It would require nothing but a browser and a text editor.

Otherwise, it's really easy to get lost in boilerplate before you even know what the payoff is.

> You could run a bit of JavaScript right off your filesystem. It would require nothing but a browser and a text editor.

It's good to show what's possible but it isn't fun and will bore them to death fast because it's very limiting for beginners.

I suppose it depends on what sparked their curiosity in the first place. Every professional has an origin story, something that made them want to slog through years of practice to get to where they are.

I can think of many ways to spark people's interest in cooking or music, but programming seems a bit harder to me. I never thought about why I love it, let alone why others should.

How would you do that?

> I can think of many ways to spark people's interest in cooking or music

Combining programming with music is a cool idea - https://sonic-pi.net/

> I was going to say "I'd skip all the traditional web-dev stuff...

Go is simple but not really beginner friendly. In my opinion teaching novices should start with Ruby (not Python or Javascript that's so often is the case). Show them how to do simple scripts, later build some games together.

Web-dev stuff like React, Webpack, Node etc should be out of the question, it would be a huge turn off for kids; heck it is that even for adults.

I feel like this could hold true for any program that tries to get anyone (young or older) into programming.

A lot of these programs try the 'hard-sell' of "programming is soooooo much fun and important" on participants and if you're not in it for the hard work and the minutiae of what takes to build a "modern web app", you're just never going get that into coding.

That is unfortunate. I wonder if perhaps undirected learning is where the magic is in this sort of thing and the lack is in tool availability. Certainly it's how lots of us learned.

I agree that undirected learning is huge. I don't know how I'd go about reproducing it... you need both availability of resources (software and hardware), and you need plenty of relaxed time spent with those resources to find the particular angle you end up taking into the environment. That doesn't seem compatible with a bootcamp-ish weekend program where you get hand-held through "making a web app" because the point is to Make You A Coder.

If I was trying to figure out how to actually give kids the opportunity to get interested in coding, well, I'd start off trying to go for an open-ended after-school program, where you can drop in and mess around with computer stuff with access to knowledgeable adults if needed. I'd try to get the adults to propose interesting little projects that might capture the imagination of the kids. I'd try to get donated VPS time, not so we can force the kids to make cookie-cutter web apps but so they can put together their own janky terrible stuff, and if they screw up we just kill the VPS and start over. Personally, I think trying to focus on games too much is also a mistake--either you end up with the Logo turtle (educational but incredibly boring) or you have 9 kids just playing Minecraft while the tenth actually learns to script it.

If it's not this one in particular, what's the relevance of your comment? It says nothing about this one.

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