Mostly Lost: A children's book that teaches programming without a computer | Hacker News Reader

Mostly Lost: A children's book that teaches programming without a computer

laurenipsum.org

91 pointsColinWright55 comments

Off topic.

But the idea of "summer school" I've picked from the first page is so terrible that it hurt me badly just by reading it.

"Extra classes are how to get ahead, mom said." - Why should a child care about "getting ahead"? Now adults don't get enough of this so we have to torture children too?

Will probably be sad for the rest of the day.

This thinking is very common amongst a certain class of parents. Trying talking to parents of children in private school. They are often hyper-competitive; constantly comparing their children against their classmates and forcing them from an early age (primary level) into extra classes to 'get ahead'.

This was once summarized for me by someone in Palo Alto as "it's either Harvard or the gutter".

I understand that, but for me, summer holidays are sacred. You can cramp more useless things (think music school or painting) into the rest of the year, but don't you dare touch summer!

>You can cramp more useless things (think music school or painting) into the rest of the year, but don't you dare touch summer! //

I used to think that art was useless. Then I grew up and now I think that it's pretty essential to a fulfilled life. Not to material wealth but to personal enrichment.

FWIW I'm rubbish at artistic realism and can barely hold a tune singing (I've no sense of rhythm either).

Participating in art by consuming or by producing?

The latter has a pretty poor performance when done by kids. In the best case they go to music school/painting lessons and earn no skills and no satisfaction and no results; in worse case they show some promise and try to study art only to figure out that they can't live off art and they aren't that good anyway.

I was in the first bucket.

Producing. It's not the destination, it's the journey.

For some people, including myself, it's both unproductive and not much interesting.

I'd really love to sit and talk with you about this but I don't feel it will be productive in this medium, thanks for your comments

Depends on the environment and the private school - for the school our son attends the only thing that people are "hyper-competitive" about is rugby!

As someone who previously had almost no interest in team sports I have to admit that I've been rather impressed at "character building" aspects of a school that is very rugby focused - although I hate to think what it is like for kids who don't like this particular sport.

[Edit: Oddly enough, at the age of 12 our son also announced one day that he'd like to go to Harvard, a pleasingly audacious goal for a 12 year old Scot.]

People in the UK will move house to get into the catchment area of a good (free) school. Not just secondary school (ages 11 to 16) but for primary schools too (ages 5 to 10). That's an investment of hundreds of thousands of pounds for something which (at primary school ages) doesn't appear to have much of an evidence base.

I haven't heard anyone saying "It's Harvard or the gutter", but they're similar.

The housing phenomenon you describe is absolutely ubiquitous in the US as well.

I'm intrigued that you didn't anglicise to "... Oxbridge or the gutter". Is Harvard now both as well known as and more prestigious than Oxbridge in the UK?

I'm just lazy, that's why I didn't anglicise. I would think that Harvard is as well known as Oxbridge. I'm not sure about the other Ivy League colleges.

Agreed.

It's interesting how culture arcs between similar practices. Prior to the 20th century (and likely prior to the 1940s) in the U.S., children often did large amounts of work. There was a period of "kids being kids" as we enjoyed prosperity (and a move away from factories and farms), but we seem to be swinging back in the direction of "kids as workers," albeit for different reasons.

It's perhaps worth noting that there's research showing that poorer, less supported children actually regress during long summer breaks, while those with a family with a "get ahead" attitude maintain or improve.

For that reason alone I'd abolish long summer breaks (and homework, which also actively hurts the progress of less supported children) perhaps trading off shorter days and/or more regular but shorter holiday breaks.

>that poorer, less supported children actually regress during long summer breaks //

Presumably you mean poorer as in less financially wealthy.

Is this just an observation that parents who educate their kids educate their kids?

Isn't your proposal just a way of harming the education of more able kids?

If parents are neglecting to aid their children's education over a long summer break why do you feel that dividing that break up will stop the parents from neglecting to aid their children's education?

Less homework I'll go with.

I believe the mechanism is simply that you forget stuff if not actively using it (for the long holidays) and that practising something you are doing wrong is more harmful than not doing it at all (for homework).

Both problems are mitigated by having parents that have the time, ability and inclination to help you. If we're trying to find out who has the most well-off parents we could abolish school and award jobs based on the zipcode you were born in. If we're trying to actually educate a population then we should ditch the long holidays and the homework.

This would only hurt better-off children relatively (and may even help some or even all of them in absolute terms), as their peers would no longer be such poor students. I like to think the benefits of having an educated population would outweigh the benefit of being a big fish in an educationally small pond.

>the most well-off parents //

You make good points but you appear to be equating financial poverty with intellectual poverty. Whilst there are probably pretty well defined links and very strong correlations they are not coterminous factors.

>If we're trying to actually educate a population then we should ditch the long holidays and the homework. //

Yes educating populations is a different consideration. What I'd ask first is for what purpose you're educating the population? Don't presuppose a direction behind that question please, I'm absolutely not saying that people shouldn't be educated (possibly even against their will) but one needs to start the whole system with an ideal IMO to which to work - why?

Just a thought, "getting ahead" can be for that child's own enjoyment. The concept of getting the required tasks complete in an efficient manner so that you can focus on the tasks most interesting to you is a skill I think everyone can benefit from. Certainly it helps to learn this sooner in life than later.

I took summer school to get classes like Health, Drivers Ed, and so forth out of the way to make room in my schedule for classes I wanted to take but wouldn't have been able to otherwise: Woodworking, Introduction to Networking (ICDN1), and Computer Repair (A+ Cert).

Also, summer school was a neat experience. It was ran much more like a long lecture in college than your standard high school class and introduced me to people that became friends I wouldn't have otherwise met.

Why do you have spend your precious time off to be able to take courses that you want? Why can't you just take the courses you want while staying on schedule?

IMO dipping into summer holidays more or less equals unpaid overtime at work. Society can force one to do that, but it's unfair, draining and not that much productive.

A nice idea, but I'm not convinced. I'd be interested to see an excerpt that taught an actual programming concept. See also "The Number Demon" (Or devil - (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Number-Devil-Mathematical-Adventure/...) which could have been brilliant but has a few problems.

Still, good luck! Anything that helps teach programming thinking is probably a good thing.

Out of curiosity, what were the problems with The Number Devil? I remember reading it when I was younger and felt I had a good grasp on how things were presented.

Just my personal opinion: I didn't like the way that names of people and theories were changed to other stuff; and it can feel a bit repetitive with the dialogue. I'm not saying the book is awful, and I know other people will think it's good.

I loved that book but you're right. The punny names for things were too cute and did not translate well from the German, despite heroic effort. I gather that they are a bit strained even in the original, eg calling a square root a "radish".

To give the puns in Lauren Ipsum a fighting chance, I hewed closer to Latin roots and avoided homonyms and homophones. We'll see how it goes.

Thank you for the response! Some general comments: this book does not try to explain all of computer science. There's already a guy working on that book, and it's taken him 50 years so far. Laurie does learn some programming in the book. Mostly she learns the little things that programmers take for granted, like how to put yourself in the state of mind for debugging.

Just thinking about what you wrote; I think that it would be really nice if someone wrote a book for adult programmers about the opposite thing: how to get yourself out of the state of mind for debugging when you go home.

This seems like it would teach kids meaningless (to them) terms and concepts they aren't ready to understand yet.

It'd be more interesting if it brought programming challenges into the context of the daily life a child but it seems to just define things as is. For example, the travelling salesman section just defined what a traveling salesman problem is.

After a read-through, the writing seems a bit self-consciously clever, the humor seemingly intended to pat the "savvy" adult reader on the back. This chapter anyway doesn't strike me as something particularly useful for educational purposes.

I actually did learn to program without a computer. At that (late 80ties) time my country was still a part of USSR, computers were rare and we had none at school. The programming class we had was meant to be taught without a computer, and it included all the necessary concepts, so we learnt about algorithms, variables, loops, etc. Later, when I finally got to use a computer all I needed to find out the particular syntax to use, I could program already. I am not sure though whether my first "real" language did spoil me beyond repair as some claim (because it was BASIC, MSX BASIC) or if does not count, because the first language I did program in was not BASIC but rather some pseudo code.

Very early on, not long after that first memorable 3-line BASIC program that printed (!) a sine wave on paper, Dad had me work thru a book on programming - no computer. Every page had an assembler-style command in the corner, and I learned much by "running" the program by hand, flipping hither & yon thru pages whilst scribbling down numbers in "registers" on paper. Don't remember the book's title or the program's function, but it did make a big impression - and was a lot of fun.

Interesting read and an interesting idea. When I was through the first read, my comparison for what I had just read was that it reminded me of 'The Phantom Tollbooth.' Thanks for posting and good luck with the project.

Yes part phantom tollbooth and patr lewis carroll. With a Dash of Diamond Age-esque Primer. I don't know, but I think my 8 year old daughter might rather like this.

Tempted.

Children Finland do not go to school all-year-round. They used to have world-record 3 months summer vacation. Also special 1-week skiing holiday in winter. In addition to regular christmasses and passovers.

I believe that all of the ex-USSR has 3 month summer vacations for schools, too.

Plus three smaller week-long vacations during the rest of the year.

I can confirm that. Here we have 3+ month of summer holiday(may25-sep1) and 3 holiday periods(more than one week) during the year. Also in Singapore they normally have 3 months summer holiday at university(student in Singapore uni myself)

Also, Finland has the best rated education system. It could be because it's really conservative, but not hard-assed (1950-style classes, but with friendly teachers). Or it could just be because of Finnish is said to be a really easy language (phonetic, consistent, and with unpretentious technical vocabulary).

It's a joke. :) I should try to dig up a country that does have year-round school.

I assumed the point to be that it wasn't true that the mother is spinning a li[n]e.

“A little Jargon doesn’t look like much. Some people even keep them as pets. But they form packs, and they are very dangerous.”

It's probably one of those children's book that grown-ups love. As a child, you might feel a little betrayed once you grow up and learn it's "just about programming".

In theory the iPad could be the perfect device to build an app for learning children to write simple programs, however apparently the Apple policy does not allow running an interpreter as part of an application, and technically speaking such an app should allow to visually build simple programs that are interpreted, so I guess, game over, but it is a huge lost opportunity.

Apple allows plenty of interpreters -- Lua, Frotz, C64 emulator, BASIC interpreters, etc. They relaxed their policy about a year ago. I doubt they're going to reject an educational app that teaches programming.

I have a hard time believing this does what it claims.

Agreed.Book seems quite complicated and filled with jargon.

I've worked with children, and I've watched them pick up new, nonsense and specialist words faster than I have, and deduce or divine their meaning and usage with amazing accuracy.

Plural of anecdote is not data, but your comment is in contrast to my personal experience.

May be you are right.I just judged the book from the excerpt. I do not have children so do not really know.

Agreed. My kids (aged 6 and 8) picked up rock climbing jargon from my wife and I (and our friends) rather quickly, and began using it in the proper context. Nothing turns heads like a five year old asking "mommy, did you send that boulder problem?"

I've done a little climbing but can't parse it ... so what did the mother do to the boulder problem?

In what way does a list of jargon teach programming?

Would you "teach cookery without a cooker" by listing ingredients? Seems very strange.

Also, few of questions on the language:

1) "and there was no one [to] tell her different."

Shouldn't this, typo aside, be "differently"? It's modifying how she was told. I see this usage a lot but it seems wrong to me.

2) "“Gether!” it said."

The others are repetitions of the sounds she makes but not this. Is this some sort of joke that I don't get? 'Gever' or 'get her' doesn't parrot "get there".

3) Along the same lines, some of the words spoken by Argot the dog-mouse are given as if they are onomatapaiea, but not all. He doesn't hamilton the word 'Hamilton' he only says it. This seems quite inconsistent and frankly as if the author is trying just a bit too hard to be like Edward Lear.

4) Does all the jargon also have a programming meaning, I know several of the terms as computing terms but also several more as non-computing terms.

Can you tell I don't like it. I love nonsense poetry and Alice in Wonderland (the original I think has too much prattling on for kids generally however), am a fan of books like Sophie's World, but this doesn't do anything for me. I'm not the target audience though for sure.

For children? I'm pretty sure any child I give this to will draw on it and not understand a word of it.

Strange creatures saying nonsensical strange words ? They will love it. I know I would have as a child.

... nonsensical words which just happen to be computer jargon? It's been done: http://www.textfiles.com/humor/COMPUTER/aliceunix.txt

I stand corrected!

My dad learned IBM assembler and COBOL from the IRS in 1968. When I, at age 10 in 1970, asked him what he did at his job, he handed me an IBM Principles of Operation (POOP) manual, an IBM green card, and a stack of punched cards with a program encoded thereupon. "Mostly Lost" is OK for today's yute, but I'm sure glad the magical mystery fairy tale school of learning was not in operation when I cut my programming teeth.

Is anyone else getting a "Quota Limit" when they click the screen?

Children program everyday. Give em a say. Defining yourself is programmatic self-worth: domain naming, contextual reframing, good thoughts.

I love Mostly Lost in name and a potential moral articulation, insofar leading us towards a gray truth - computers obey words, humans do not and words govern everyday. Words force us out onto a (new) page.

Is it psychologically healthy and sane, giving inner voice programmatic say over your domain and system, at any age?

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