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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

I have an idea;

instead of teaching "kids to code" -- how about putting together a list of [N] things every [kid/child] should know how to accomplish by [end of grammar/middle/highschool/college] using development languages [x, y, z]

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By end of grammar school a child should be able to confidently navigate the internet, and have a basic understanding of how websites work.

By end of middle school, be able to create simple web pages. * Create a blog about themselves * Create a site about an interest or passion * Create a forum where their friends can talk

By end of highschool, be able to create simple applications. * Create a time-managment app * Create a budgeting app * Create a goals tracking app

Etc....

Make sure that all kids have a common shared lexicon in this area and experience taking a stab at developing apps and sites that have the same requirements. Allow them to expound upon execution through social interaction about these items.

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It's not about creating stuff, it's about understanding how stuff works.

I can teach a monkey to set up a Wordpress page or write a "Hello World", but the skill will be useless if the monkey doesn't understand what's going on and cannot translate this skill into a different environment.

It's easy to see how badly a checklist you mentioned would work. You could teach kids those tasks using a certain kind of tools (web pages - iLife, simple apps - scaffolds in RoR; and so on), and this knowledge would be useless because the tools would change before kids would finish their education. But teach students to understand things, and this will stick. Teach people to understand how the computer works, understand how the programming languages work and so on, and they will manage to figure all the other things themselves.

If there is one skill that student should be taught though, it's "how to google things up". It's surprising, but kids don't know how to use internet to find knowledge. Everyone assumes that since they spend so much time on the internet, they should be fluent at searching. They are not.

The problem is that you're going to have a tough time teaching an 8 year old the theory behind how things work. Just show them how to do something simple with concrete results.

Each child will take this to the degree they can - some will find no interest, some will be wildly beyond the simple demo.

The point is to make sure that there are concrete results from each step, my post was just a first pass at an example, not some absolute...

The point is that it would be beneficial to have a tiered path toward advancement that can be followed.

Well, I guess what I meant was that the path should be measured by understanding of the subject, not by high-level skills. Or, at least if the skills were to be measured, they should be low-level, like - the ability to search information on the web, the ability to ask a question on a relevant forum, an ability to manage the filesystem, and so on.

As for the 8-year old understanding the theory behind how things work... I learned how body/animals operate on the biology class at the age of 10; and the basics of physics as well.

>It's easy to see how badly a checklist you mentioned would work. You could teach kids those tasks using a certain kind of tools (web pages - iLife, simple apps - scaffolds in RoR; and so on), and this knowledge would be useless because the tools would change before kids would finish their education.

Well, the point I was making to was to expose them to building something of immediate use as an effort to expose them to the process and "how stuff works" -- this would go far to helping them both understand tech as well as determine if they have interest/aptitude.

"How to google things" was effectively covered by my statement of ensuring grammar school kids could confidently and safely navigate the web.

Why on earth does every kid need to learn how to build websites?! Their heads are already being stuffed with useless stuff that is of no interest to vast majority of kids. Expose the kids to programming and let them decide, if they want to pursue it further.

Because it is simple enough to teach to 4-6th graders.

that would be an addition to the Common Core Standards it sounds like

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