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Comment by xendo | Hacker News Reader

I don't have kids, but even if I had this entry would still be totally worthless for me. It's touching and nice, but can anyone learn anything from it? I don't really think that there are any useful tips on teaching 7 year old anything, I would even say that it's quite opposite, how could anyone post code like this in such context: @property (nonatomic) IBOutlet UILabel* label; ?

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Even if a child does not fully understand everything, the child DOES understand that when they type an instruction, the computer will execute it! This is exciting, akin to finally getting that the squiggles on paper are words and letters, even if you don't know them and can't quite read them yet. The next step is to build up concepts, like executing steps in a loop, or storing information and getting it later, or starting and stopping. This is all worthwhile, even if you can't quite see it from where you are standing.

right on!

I hear you, but if you check the timeline of the lesson, I didn't teach her every step of the code, that would be too much info off the bat. I wrote a bit of boilerplate code and her lesson - as I mentioned in the post - was just those 3 lines where we talked about variables mostly.

Have you considered that XCode and Objective C may not be the right tools for the job?

Something like Scheme would be appropriate.

Scheme with graphics (i.e. a LOGO module) sounds very good. Kids are much more impressed by getting pictures to appear than seeing a number output.

on second thought I think you're right. I think it wasn't so much about the tools as much as it was about the concepts behind what coding is, what a variable is etc.

I agree, kids are pretty good at isolating something they understand from the rest and just stay focus at what makes sense. If there's a piece of code that makes sense and they wrapped their heads around it doesn't matter if the rest is gibberish.

I think that's a really good point and it's key in adult learning as well. So many times we go through tons of boring theory first until we're drained of our mental energy and by the time we get to the fun part we couldn't care less. I love courses where you do stuff right away and they tell you, "don't worry about this other stuff for now, we'll get to that soon"

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