How Early Should Kids Learn To Code? 299
the agent man writes "Wired Magazine is exploring how early kids should learn to code. One of the challenges is to find the proper time in schools to teach programming. Are teachers at elementary and middle school levels really able to teach this subject? The article suggests that even very young kids can learn to program and lists a couple of early experiments as well as more established ideas including the Scalable Game Design curriculum. However, the article also suggests that programming may have to come at the cost of Foreign language learning and music."
logic (Score:4, Insightful)
learning logic skills should be well in advance of coding. i do think our society waits too late on that.
that alone could improve lots of things out side of computer programming as well.
Re: (Score:3)
agreed.
Start with the PB&J robot.
Pretend to be a robot and have your kid give you instructions on how to make a PB&J sandwich.
When they skip a step in the algorithm, you simply respond, "HOW?"
This is probably the easiest lesson in programming and a great place to start because it forces you to think in pseudocode.
Perfect for a five year old.
Re:logic (Score:5, Interesting)
One problem with math education is that it simply isn't the same thing as logic or computer linguistics. Even Discrete Mathematics uses a whole different set of terms, jargon and solves only a subset of the sorts of logical conditions one can expect to program in a computer. But then that's been a problem for mathematics since its inception--its application to real world issues and uses...
And very few schools actually teach programming, even at the High School level, let alone at lower level education. One reason is that a programmer generally gets paid better than a public school teacher, and so if you know how to program you've probably got a better paying job not at school. Further there's the question of what is a decent education in programming--and do you focus on programming at all with the limited time and access to computers--or teach them basic computer skills and be happy with it.
In a public school you can probably expect the computer science teacher to double as a coach, with his first love being coaching. My High School experience was a bunch of us "smart kids" (most of them were kids who had dads with computers and that had taught them a few things) figuring it out, while the teacher floundered to explain sorting algorithms and what recursion was. (He had no clue, though I didn't realize this until I got to College and what had taken months to study and explain was all explained in perfect clarity by a grad student in about an hour lecture...)
Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:5, Interesting)
Programming will be picked up long the way. Many trades nowadays seems to involve some programming in some sort of language - Excel Macros; ask an accountant. But is that really important for a child's future?
What's is going to help the kid in his future academic career is reading, math, writing, music and ball sports.
Yes, sports. Sports are a great way for a kid to learn social skills. And playing ball at an early age will help the kid develop "ball sense" which will help him with any sport he chooses later on. That's something that a developing brain is most apt to learn and something that people who don't have the experience as a chile never seem to pick up. It seems to be a skill that gets hardwired in at a very early age and once that window is closed, one can never get that sense. I know , I've tried. My coaches are always asking me if I played ball sports as a child because I don't have that "ball sense". and no matter how many hours playing, I just can't get it. (I spent many hours as a child in front of the Apple ][ programming BASIC)
And music. Don't force the kid, but music.
I don't get this fetish for getting children to learn to program. In the grand scheme of things, it's a skill that's not that important as a child.
Looking back at my life (I'm mid forties), the programming as a child actually harmed me. I missed out on a lot of childhood things and it did me very little good as an adult - especially now when my job of off-shored and getting another programming job is proving to be extremely difficult.
And another thing too, all the big shots - the ones who get the six figure bonuses when they cut costs by doing things like sending jobs overseas - were all ball players in college. They are the ones with all the personal connections - they get canned, their ball playing buddies gets them another cake job.
My friends are machines and other socially inept techies.
Re:Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:4, Informative)
What's is going to help the kid in his future academic career is reading, math, writing, music and ball sports.
Yes, sports. Sports are a great way for a kid to learn social skills. And playing ball at an early age will help the kid develop "ball sense" which will help him with any sport he chooses later on. That's something that a developing brain is most apt to learn and something that people who don't have the experience as a chile never seem to pick up. It seems to be a skill that gets hardwired in at a very early age and once that window is closed, one can never get that sense. I know , I've tried. My coaches are always asking me if I played ball sports as a child because I don't have that "ball sense". and no matter how many hours playing, I just can't get it. (I spent many hours as a child in front of the Apple ][ programming BASIC)
For what it's worth, I spent quite a lot of time on ball sports at school when I grew up, and in retrospect, it was wasted time. It mainly served to build and maintain a class pecking order.
The time I spent hacking on hobby computers, on the other hand, is why I still have a job I like which pays enough to live on. Ball play? It hasn't landed me any jobs, nor made it easier to handle real life. Imagine if all the money spent on sports facilities and coaches had gone to better libraries, labs and teachers...
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Ball play? It hasn't landed me any jobs, nor made it easier to handle real life. Imagine if all the money spent on sports facilities and coaches had gone to better libraries, labs and teachers...
How would you classify your fitness level compared to others in your line of work?
Re:Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:4, Funny)
How would you classify your fitness level compared to others in your line of work?
Let's see... Rest pulse around 95, getting light headed by walking to the coffee pot - what do you think?
Re:Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:4, Informative)
I worked as teaching assistant for the computer science at a college and I have to say that, for most people, programming is *not* something that they will just pick up. I worked the computer lab for the introductory programming course and the majority of the students had to work very hard to learn programming.
The point at which students initially had difficulty varied too. A surprising number had trouble with concept of a for loop. All of those students did make it past that though. What all of the students that had significant trouble with the course had in common, though, was the ability to generalize. They had problems with coming up with simple algorithms to solve simple problems. They could describe how to solve for very specific circumstances. Indeed, it seemed, most of the students could code a solution to a very specialize specific scenario, but, at least initially, not the general case. Many student improved greatly in this regard by the end, but a decent number still had issues (and I am only considering the ones that put forth effort in the course).
Most of the students having issues could somewhat understand logical concepts. They could debug simple implementation issues, and they could usually look at other people's working code and explain what the code was doing. These students lacked the ability to think abstractly and apply logic and their learning to new problems where the steps to solve the problem weren't laid out for them. I believe it is the same issue you see in middle/high school math classes where many students can manipulate equations just fine but have problems with solving story problems.
So, I do believe learning (proper) programming at an early age would benefit people. They would get more practice with thinking abstractly and have a venue for seeing practical and essentially immediate results.
Also, I don't thinking learning to program would have to supplant other courses. It could be be used in addition to other topics. For example, children could be give a code that performs math on single digits numbers and then modify to handle numbers with multiple digits. Imagine programming long division and handling remainders. I think implementing the code for this would allow children to understand numbers and math at a deeper level.
Ensuring programming was taught to everyone would have some benefits for employed programmers and to society in general, also. Right now, you see people in forums making comments about the sad state of some particular piece of software and how easy it should to fix an issue or how some problem should be easy to solve with a computer and why don't the programmers just code it up. People would come to realize the difficultly of creating a good program and what trade offs must be made for a program to be made quickly and relatively cheaply and perhaps they would decide for different trade-offs.
Re:Reading, writing math, music and ball sports. (Score:5, Interesting)
Coding will not help that. It's a big problem everywhere - and has been for years.
My Feynman recalls his experience teaching science in Brazil [v.cx]. They score very high on tests, but they suffer from the exact same problem - they can answer a very specific question, but when put in a similar situation, fail to realize it.
The fundamental problem is not coding. It's the way we teach - in this case, it's a form of rote memorization rather than application. Memorization is easy - ask any student who studies for a test and can spew back facts, figures and formulas without skipping a beat.
The thing is, it's application of the concepts, or realization when situations are very similar.
It's not limited to science - we often say "history repeats itself" because it's true - but it makes you wonder why we don't see it coming given that similar situations crop up again and again and again. (Heck, the Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence made important observations - remember the part about "light and transient causes"?).
The thing education lacks is the ability to teach synthesis, because it's very hard, and it's something that's difficult to apply to an entire classroom because everyone is different. (Synthesis is where you take what you know and apply it by synthesizing a solution - basically by seeing generalizations). Sometimes it's called critical thinking though that term is usually only in reference to texts.
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Re:logic (Score:4, Insightful)
So bring back philosophy classes. There was a time when philosophy was a core part of education, when students were taught to think, not merely regurgitate.
Aside from that, I think you're over-emphasizing the complexity of basic boolean logic that is required by the average programmer. At the level we're talking about, basic parenthesized AND and OR constructs are more than adequate; there is no need to introduce elementary school kids to concepts like NOR or XOR.
The languages used need to change pretty dramatically, too. Pascal-style compilers that produce some kind of code after error correction insertions would be far more helpful for kids to learn than barf-on-missing-semicolon compilers like Java. An awful lot of "errors" in code are caused by syntactic sugar, not actual errors in the logic being described.
Letting such code run with any resulting errors could be as educational for the kids as seeing the results of properly structured code run.
That's if the concept of a text language needs to be maintained at all. I've worked with a 4GL that used pictures and flow chart diagrams to "code". It was doable, but a pain in the butt for someone like me who prefers to type instead of mouse. But for kids used to tablets and phones, it might actually be an easier and quicker coding environment than a traditional keyboard. Using that language gave me a kickstart on thinking about how to do such an interface better. I don't think I want to tackle the job, but over the past couple or three years I've come to realize that text based programming is an arcane art that might well someday be dead except for a few historians still slugging away at COBOL.
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...and so if you know how to program you've probably got a better paying job not at school.
My wife is a grade school teacher and I am a programmer. She couldn't do my job and there's no way I could do hers. Even if the two professions paid equally, I don't believe that someone who can program can also teach, or that someone who can teach can also program.
Saying that being able to program means you can't teach is like saying being able to program means you don't have fashion sense, being able to program means you aren't good at sports, or being able to program means you have poor social skills.
...I'm not sure which side of the argument I'm on, either.
Re:logic (Score:4, Interesting)
And math education in the US and around the world is abysmal.
Have you taken school math "around the world"? As someone who graduated from HS in post-Soviet Russia I can testify that US high school graduates are at the level of 6-graders in Russia. And Physics is not even a requirement in US! I would easily place US at the bottom 30% of the world at school science preparation.
Re: logic (Score:5, Interesting)
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Exactly.
Amusing: quote at the bottom of the page is "There is very little future in being right when your boss is wrong."
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My computer had one disavantage at the time: there was no software available (except for the BASIC interpreter). Later, I appreciated that this was actually an advantage: by the time I went to university I had written about 200 games, a couple of word processors and a spreadsheet program.
Exactly, and the big disadvantage of today's computers is that they have too much software with almost no skill required to use it. You pretty much boot up right into FaceBook, why would you learn to program? There's just no challenge anymore, you don't need to know how it works, it's an appliance. Kids just prefer to play games rather than make some simplistic BASIC program that does nothing they're interested in.
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He saw someone else using it at school and asked me to install it at home, then he basically taught himself to program simple games in it.
Lately, he has been creating mods for Minetest [minetest.net], again entirely on his own (researching the file format, reading the project Wiki, dissecting other user's Mods, etc)
I have a bunch of Python resources standing by for when he wants to take another step up.
In utero (Score:2)
If not sooner.
Re:In utero (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with teaching children in utero is the smarter ones hack mommy's system and that makes for a difficult pregnancy, with her constantly craving hot pockets, bacon flavored snacks and highly caffienated beverages.
Re:In utero (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, read them the complete works of Donald Knuth while incapable of running
Nah, save that for later, when you need sleep.
teach reasoning, curiosity, specificity in preshoo (Score:5, Insightful)
Preschoolers can start learning 90% of programming - thinking clearly, being specific about what you mean, looking at HOW things work. I was actually coding BASIC around third grade I guess, but code is a small part of programming.
Pre-setting a macro in a toy truck is programming, and develops the skills - breaking down a desired outcome into specific steps, trying it and then making refinements, etc.
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Re: teach reasoning, curiosity, specificity in pre (Score:3)
/sarcasm What!? Next you'll be telling me people carved naked statues having sex on the temples for decoration ... :)
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Re:teach reasoning, curiosity, specificity in pres (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. Because as every parent will tell you, all you have to do is explain the logic to a preschooler and bam! You have instant recognition and the child will follow you request.
As the parent of a 4 yr old, you just need to know how to do it in a way that 'tricks' them into learning. Preschoolers have tons of urges to do things, they just don't know how yet. That's why they seem holy terrors trying to get your attention. They know there are lots of things to do, but they are currently limited in their ability to actually do those things.
So if a 4 yr old wants to watch 'Jake and the Neverland Pirates', I don't put it on for them. I sit down with them and ask them what we need to do. I get them to tell me that we need to turn on the television. Ok, then what? "Now we get the 'bemote'." Where is it? "I don't know." Where did you last use it? "On the beanbag chair." OK, should I look for it in the couch? "No, it's over here near the beanbag." Ok, now what do you do with the remote? "I press OK on the red box (netflix icon on Roku)" OK, what now? "I pick 'Jake' and press ok."
Yeah, that sounds pretty mundane, but even something as simple as putting on a children's show can be used as a process for walking through a problem in a step-by-step manner, and steps like asking where they might have last used the missing remote, and then suggesting we look in the 'wrong' location to get them to understand the deductive process and elimination of impossible options.
That's how you you start it.
Then, when you trust them more, get them to help you in the kitchen. Cooking is the ultimate in 'introductory programming'.
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Kids don't default to wild inattentive hoodlums
No. They are 'wild ATTENTIVE hoodlums'.
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>Kids don't default to wild inattentive hoodlums, it's learned behavior like anything else.
You obviously have only one child.
That's attention-seeking. Kids are good at learning to do more extreme things in order to actually get someone to pay attention to their needs and desires as opposed to someone else's.
My Experience (Score:4, Interesting)
When I got to university, I discovered how much of the theoretical side I was missing. The main problem with teaching programming at an early age is that it really needs to be accompanied by teaching logic and then game and graph theory. I've seen classes that do this well for under-10s, but they're very rare.
[1] The Dijkstra comment that teaching BASIC should be a criminal offence doesn't really apply to BBC BASIC, which had full support for structured programming, an integrated assembler, and direct access to memory-mapped hardware.
[2] Back then, you really needed makefiles because there was no equivalent to a modern compiler driver. Compilation, assembly, and linking were all separate, manual, steps.
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I was 7 when I learned to program. We had one lesson a week taught by the school's headmaster on whatever he thought was interesting, and so he taught some programming in BASIC[1] on the BBC Model B. He also taught some geometry using Logo on the same machine. It was connected to a big TV (which, by modern standards, is a small TV), and he'd ask the class to describe the program and he'd type it. After school and at lunch and break times there were a few of these machines that we could use, and I learned a bit more. I asked my father to teach me a real language, and he taught me PL/M86 (which I still miss sometimes), and I then moved on to C[2].
When I got to university, I discovered how much of the theoretical side I was missing. The main problem with teaching programming at an early age is that it really needs to be accompanied by teaching logic and then game and graph theory. I've seen classes that do this well for under-10s, but they're very rare.
[1] The Dijkstra comment that teaching BASIC should be a criminal offence doesn't really apply to BBC BASIC, which had full support for structured programming, an integrated assembler, and direct access to memory-mapped hardware. [2] Back then, you really needed makefiles because there was no equivalent to a modern compiler driver. Compilation, assembly, and linking were all separate, manual, steps.
I learned to read on the computer. We got an Apple-II when I was ~3 years old (I am dating myself now). My older siblings would use the BASIC interpreter built into the device to make it scroll "Jittles sucks" infinitely, things like that. By 5 I was doing the same thing back to them. It's amazing what a little sibling rivalry can do. I started checking out programming books from my elementary school library by the time I was 8. I don't even know whether an elementary school library has such books whe
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My daughter started when she was 8 using Logo and turtle graphics (IBM Logo) on my PC. She's 35 and a DBA in New York now :)
[John]
Re:My Experience (Score:4, Insightful)
> [1] The Dijkstra comment that teaching BASIC should be a criminal offence doesn't really apply to BBC BASIC, which had full support for structured programming, an integrated assembler, and direct access to memory-mapped hardware.
BBC BASIC was good, but even Microsoft BASIC was better than nothing. Saying you shouldn't teach kids how to cook unless you're teaching them fine cuisine is stupid.
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I learned when I was 20. I never felt that learning at a younger age would have done anything for me. Rather, I valued the emphasis on math and reading which gave me an attention span of days if it was a difficult problem instead of seconds and throwing my hands up.
I guess I don't see the utility of teaching kids programming while they are young, but then I only have one data point to go on. I know from teaching logic that I would much rather the students had a good math background and the ability to think
Do kids actually learn anything in music? (Score:2, Troll)
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Yes, I think this is a bigger problem with schooling in general. The problem, at least here in the UK, is that you have to follow these subjects for years, even if they're worthless to a particular kid because they have zero interest in them and nothing will get them interested in them at that age.
I learnt nothing from music, drama (acting), French, German, and English literature when I was a kid, they were complete and utter wastes of my time.
Schools should be allowed to spot kids that have zero interest i
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Some blame has to fall on the teachers and the official curriculum that hamstrings them. If they present the subject in a bone dry manner, they will completely fail to capture the interest of any student who isn't already interested. If they are not prepared to take a different approach than the average, there will be kids that will miss out on the initial ah-ha experience that allows them to appreciate the rest.
I do agree that if a subject has failed to capture their interest, harping on it for the next se
ASAP (Score:5, Insightful)
Programming on itself isn't so useful, but learning to divide and organize a complex idea into it's base elements is one of the biggest flaws of the existing curricula. Almost no effort is done in that direction before kids reach college ages and not even for all kinds of degrees, at that point.
Programming as a board game (Score:3)
There's a project on Kickstarter aimed for ages 3+that ends in a few hours:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/danshapiro/robot-turtles-the-board-game-for-little-programmer?ref=live [kickstarter.com]
(Robot Turtles: The Board Game for Little Programmers)
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Figuring out the grand design of a complex idea can leave beginners like me paralysed, I can understand and value concepts like modularity but on their own it just feels vague when trying to come up with a design from little experience.
It's like eating an elephant: take one bite at a time. Pick a little bit that you think you can tackle and have a go at it. Then take on another bit. And another. Don't be afraid to go back and redo if you find out you're wrong; everyone's wrong sometimes, you've just got to try again.
When they want to. And ONLY when they want to. (Score:4, Insightful)
Jesus Christ. It's disgusting to see all of these comments saying "early", or "by the time they're 4", or something along those lines. Jesus Fucking Christ!
Kids should learn to code IF AND ONLY IF THEY WANT TO, AND ONLY WHEN THEY WANT TO .
Forcing it on them surely won't help. It'll just alienate them from it.
If a kid wants to learn to code, and expresses this interest, then provide him or her all of the support that's possible. Otherwise, bugger off and leave the kid alone. Just how nerdy kids don't like to be subjected to football and other sports against their will, athletic kids very likely don't want to be subjected to computer programming against their will.
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No, just plain wrong.
The idea that kids should only learn about or do things that they explicitly present an interest in is simply retarded. Kids should be exposed to all kinds of different things, because if you don't expose them to all the things they'll have no clue which of them they are interested in, or find fun.
Sure, there comes a point where if your kid is going "daddy daddy, I want to go windsurfing" you shouldn't tell them "no, we're going to program for the next 3 weeks", but that doesn't mean t
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> Kids should learn to code IF AND ONLY IF THEY WANT TO, AND ONLY WHEN THEY WANT TO .
Er... I guess they should only learn math, English, history, geography and whatever else IF AND ONLY IF THEY WANT TO as well. Imagine the education cost savings if we only taught children what they wanted to learn!
We teach children what they need to know, and _what we need them to know_ to further our economy. Our future economy needs more children to know how to code, at least as much as they need to know history, geogr
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IF AND ONLY IF THEY WANT TO, AND ONLY WHEN THEY WANT TO
My favorite subjects are Lunch, Nap, "Free Play"/Gym, and Sex Ed., which I believe are in line with all of humanities favorite activities.
(Bonus points for a Pip & Flinx reference to the Ulru-Ujurrians, the advanced race who simply wants to "eat, sleep, mate, and play games".)
Difficult pros and cons (Score:3)
Tossing programming courses in the curriculum is a wise idea, but now one has to balance the value add across the entire group if you're going to remove things like foreign language skills or music, both of which I see offering a considerable challenge to the value argument.
I highly doubt the person wanting to visit a foreign country will be praising the fact they have excellent programming skills at age 17, and yet find they cannot communicate.
Ask any programmer. 99% of them cannot live without music. It can help feed the creative mind that job demands. Learning about various kinds of music and their benefits (such as classical music impact on brain wave activity) rather than growing up shoehorned into the top pop/YouTube culture can be key to unlocking the potential of the creative mind.
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Putting on music tunes out the distractions for the 2nd half, allowing the first half to hum along uninterrupted.
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I actually find that I have a very difficult time focusing on programming if the music has any lyrics. Or were we talking about instrumental stuff?
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> Tossing programming courses in the curriculum is a wise idea, but now one has to balance the value add across the entire group if you're going to remove things like foreign language skills or music, both of which I see offering a considerable challenge to the value argument.
Why does anything need to be removed? And shouldn't parents be given the option to decide if their child learns to learn music, a foreign language, or computer programming?
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I highly doubt the person wanting to visit a foreign country will be praising the fact they have excellent programming skills at age 17, and yet find they cannot communicate.
When I was in Germany, I had just finished my degree in Computer Engineering so programming was fresh in my mind. I was also fluent in Spanish. Communication was done in English and 'Bitte Danke Bitte, der Rechnung bitte' since I didn't meet a single person in Germany who knew Spanish.
(That said, I agree with your point.)
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There are truly extraordinary programmers who not only don't listen to music while they code, they don't listen to music at any time. They don't see the point. I don't put myself in the extraordinary programmer bucket, but I have only the most superficial and passing interest in music. For example, I never have it on when I'm coding. I feel that it distracts me slightly and that I want all my mental resources available to focus on the problems I'm working on.
Everyone thinks their specialty or interest is so
As early as they can read (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well, at least one person's trying to fix it.
Dude's (rather successfully) Kickstarting a LOGO-esque boardgame [kickstarter.com] for the purpose of teaching kids the fundamentals of programming. He says it's for 3+, and has played it with his own 4-year old kids. Because it's pictorial, they don't even need to be able to read to start learning basic logic.
That's fairly easy (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as they're interested in it. Simple as that.
Huh? That doesn't fit into your curriculum? Then I think it's time you ponder whether your curriculum has a problem or whether you want to continue making it the kids' problem.
Re:That's fairly easy (Score:4, Informative)
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The closest I got to lea
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e.g., the lack of interest in CS by girls
Maybe girls are just not interested, like my son is not interested in dressing Barbie dolls, and my daughter is not interested in turning the planters into a construction zone? Couldn't we just leave it at that?
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That's obvious (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as they ask that they want to learn how to do it is when you should start engaging them not only in coding but other computer science topics as well. Before my kids (3 out of 4) learned the basics of programming, they also had a fundamental understanding of electronics not because I pushed it on them but because they saw me working and started asking questions. Coding isn't for everybody and despite efforts to the contrary, it's more creative than people would think at first. That's the fatal assumption, if you have a foundation with Math and good logic skills that doesn't equate to being good or even liking coding as a profession. Now, if you ask my three kids (who are now 18+) what they want to do in terms of careers, one is in a CS program the others are not taking that track.
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No point in teaching them programming. (Score:2)
If the corporate culture has its way, all of those jobs will be outsourced by the time today's toddlers get to the job market.
"At the const of" language skills? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's absurd. Learning time-sensitive ordered tasks, such as in music or dance, or alternative ways to express similar ideas, such as language skills, are invaluable to skilled programmers. The ideas of checklists, logical operations, and revising a program on the basis of alternate events, learning about backup and what you can lose without it, are all useful.
I'd be more concerned about what happens with _bad_ programming lessons, being taught to manipulate only GUI based patterns in a teacher expected way or be marked down for not doing it the way an uninformed, underpaid coding monkey wrote to mark the checksheet off their daily tasks and pays no attention to encouraging the children to learn how things work. I'm concerned tht the children will be taught only how to fill out a checklist blindly. I've worked with programmers taught that way, and they can become an active obstacle to good computing, good science, or even good politics.
I'm afraid that a lot of the pre-teen children I've been meeting in public school would be better off, though, with real recess or a daily siesta rather than yet another mandatory lesson that requires sitting in a computer classroom. They're exhausted, and getting their bodies moving is being neglected in conflicting academic policies and goals.
Re:"At the const of" language skills? (Score:4, Informative)
That's absurd. Learning time-sensitive ordered tasks, such as in music or dance, or alternative ways to express similar ideas, such as language skills, are invaluable to skilled programmers. The ideas of checklists, logical operations, and revising a program on the basis of alternate events, learning about backup and what you can lose without it, are all useful.
I'd be more concerned about what happens with _bad_ programming lessons, being taught to manipulate only GUI based patterns in a teacher expected way or be marked down for not doing it the way an uninformed, underpaid coding monkey wrote to mark the checksheet off their daily tasks and pays no attention to encouraging the children to learn how things work. I'm concerned tht the children will be taught only how to fill out a checklist blindly. I've worked with programmers taught that way, and they can become an active obstacle to good computing, good science, or even good politics.
I'm afraid that a lot of the pre-teen children I've been meeting in public school would be better off, though, with real recess or a daily siesta rather than yet another mandatory lesson that requires sitting in a computer classroom. They're exhausted, and getting their bodies moving is being neglected in conflicting academic policies and goals.
Finally someone who is paying attention to children's physiology. Their sleeping patterns are different from adults, and they do require additional sleep (and depending on their age, different nutritional content.)
Also, as you said, it is important to give precedence to more fundamental, cognitive/social skills. Slashdot is infected by too many keyboard warriors that think coding should become a basic, fundamental topic. It is not.
Don't rush kids into learning to code. Get them to learn the essentials first, math/algebra, natural sciences, language, history, civics and the basics of personal finance. All that, in particular personal finance, are more important that learning to code. We have a lot of shitty coders as it is, and a lot of people who suck at the basics of math, history, civics and logical thinking. What the do people think it's going to happen when we rush/force kids to learn to code?
Also, who is going to teach coding? A proficient developer, or a we going to repeat the current pattern of forcing a teacher of specialty X to teach specialty Y for which he/she is completely unqualified?
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> Their sleeping patterns are different from adults, and they do require additional sleep
Looks like we, as adults, also naturally require different sleep patterns than we engage in the last couple centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep#Segmented_sleep_as_a_historical_norm [wikipedia.org]
No age is too early (Score:2)
Try junior high (Score:3)
In my education, there was a big dead zone called junior high where the state curriculum taught very little new material -- just algebra and a little civics -- and spent most of the time rehashing what had been taught in elementary school. The prevailing wisdom that "raging hormones" made the junior-high kids unreceptive to new learning. Seriously, this is what principals and superintendents said. It's the most insulting thing to the pupils I can imagine.
Junior high was when some of my friends started taking drugs. I was reading a book a day just to kill the boredom, and I'm convinced I would have been better off skipping class and reading two books a day.
So you could give the kids something useful to learn during those two years, instead of spending taxpayer money to basically babysit them.
Forcing them to learn is bad (Score:2)
Robot Turtles (Score:4, Insightful)
Robot Turtles is a board game for kids ages 3-8. It takes seconds to learn, minutes to play, and will keep them learning for hours. Kids won't know it but while they're playing, they're learning the fundamentals of programming.
What's "coding"? (Score:2)
I'm not a software developer or anything of that sort. Maybe school children can have some sort of programming lessons as part of maths, just organised in a different way than it was back in my younger days.
My school maths curriculum included logic operations when I was in 10th grade (16-17 years old)
Converting numbers from base 10 to base 2, base 8, base whatever when I was in 5th grade (10-11 years old)
Is that the basis for "coding", or do people mean clicking on UI elements and assigning them existing fu
If your using Singapore math (Score:2)
See how that goes and think about using Logo, Basic or Pascal when the time is right and if interested.
Shouldn't be forced (Score:2)
LOGO (Score:3)
When I was 6 (in 1981) my Grade 2 class learned LOGO (at least the turtle graphics part). Of course I had been programming on my TS1000 for a year at that point, and so was mostly helping the other children. But still, pretty much everyone in the class "got it".
Why they stopped (and they did stop, after all) teaching programming to kids that age, I don't know. It was a stupid move. Really stupid.
Interesting Concept (Score:2)
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Totally, because as history has shown time and time again, only people who were really great in a particular subject as kids go on to bring anything great into the world, and there has never, ever, not even once, been someone who was initially thought to be very bad at a subject who later became a true giant in the field.
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Duh, as early as they can handle it (Score:2)
How Early Should Kids Learn To Code?
As early as they are capable of devising logical constructs (probably by the 2nd grade) IF AND ONLY IF they provide an aptitude and desire for it.
What is so difficult about programing? (Score:2)
As soon as they're interested (Score:2)
I started my programming "career" with LOGO back in third grade. I almost immediately fell in love with programming. When they stopped teaching it at higher levels, I taught myself - first TI-BASIC, then C++, then anything I could get my hands on. Eventually I got into a high school that taught programming, where I re-learned Java and C++.
But I learned all that because I wanted to. You force every kid to follow the path I did, you'll get a bunch of kids who never want to program again, and probably aren't a
easy (Score:3)
How Early Should Kids Learn To Code?
After they learn Karate.
the earlier the better (Score:2)
When I was in 4th grade, we had those Atari workstations where we'd pop in a cartridge and do typing tutors. We also learned Logo, which at the time, I didn't equate with programming. In 6th grade, I had a class where we'd write BASIC on PCjrs and that's where I became totally enamored with the fact that I could have the computer do what I wanted. Even though the extent of the class was just drawing graphics to the screen, we learned a little about `for` loops and I was able to do some basic colour-cycling
You don't force kids to learn. (Score:2)
The time to teach them about programming is when they ask how the magic screens work. From there they'll have an interest, or they won't..
Personally (Score:2)
I learned coding at the ripe old age of 5. When other's were playing with the turtle paint program, I was teaching myself to write some simple code on the Apple IIe. In retrospect, I'm grateful that my teachers let me play around with the computer and didn't try to keep me on task with Turtle Paint. By 7, I was teaching adults how to do basic coding at the public library's programing courses. When the teacher got stumped, she'd call me over to help figure it out.
It's never too early to start kids on pro
stop it (Score:2)
As early as possible (Score:2)
I learned to write in basic when I was 6, even though I could hardly spell at the time, coding and typing came together,
most words were very short and easy but I still remember, 30 years later, memorizing REPEAT. I consider this a good experience.
I also had the chance to teach a class of 5 year olds to do "Lego-logo", this was a once week afternoon activity for 20 weeks.
They would build from mechanical lego. and would then program it on the computer by arranging large colorful blocks in order, the building
I think (Score:5, Funny)
I think 8 am is about the right time to start.
Coding over music (Score:2)
logic (Score:2)
As others have pointed out, code is just a specific implementation.
Any sufficiently complex logic becomes programming. (As I tried to tell a former marketing manager, who now spends 80+% of his time "programming" instead of marketing, in his "don't need programmers anymore" system.)
I could envision all sorts of early educational implementations ... "if Princess X comes into the room, do A; if Princess Y comes into the room, do B."
Start with a little, some other things to decrease (Score:2)
The Faulty Premise Hazard (Score:2)
Young, developing minds have difficulty separating reality from fantasy. In many ways society encourages this, whether with Santa Claus or "happily ever after". This disconnect is used to comfort and motivate the developing child. The cost comes later in life, when many still have trouble discerning between attractive falsehoods, ("global warming has no anthropogenic causes"), and hard, cold fact.
Many here have proposed teaching logic before coding, and that is reasonable, but as a first step, perception m
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Well, technically, logic only shows you what follows from what. I does not teach you what is true and what isn't true. It might help you discern an untruth if that leads to a contradiction, but it doesn't help you know what is true simpliciter.
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you lost me at: and so forth
And btw. your numbers are way off, 500 million teachers for 6 billion people means every 6th person is a teacher, or every 4th adult is a teacher.
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Um. We need Economists, Scientists, Marketers, School Guards.... aka all sorts of professions.
Yes we do.
Only a small subset of professions need coders (I am one of them).
That too is correct.
Its not a key skill for everyone to have,
What everyone needs is reading, social skills, morals, history, politics, and so forth; not coding.
And maths. And science. And geography. And a foreign language. So, why not code?
Coding is as much a part of the modern world as any of those things. Most people won't need most of
Re:Rubbish.. we need children to learn social skil (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, not everyone needs to be able to code bubblesort or beyond, right.
But slomst every profession would profit from a simple understanding of batch or macro programming. Nothing too complicated. function calls, true/false, if/then. put even return values, vars and loops into an advanced version.
That's the basics really anyone can profit from. From the secretary automating word with a small macro (as simple as inserting a timstamp on pressing a function key) to users of ifttt.com or setting up Llama/Tasker on their phones. And it's the foundation for learning some real coding later. And some basic logical skills and ability to break down requirements into smaller steps can't hurt either.
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Yeah, I plan to make my kids listen to gcc syntax error messages.
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Hmm.. I should have my old C64 datasette tapes around somewhere.....
Re:As early as possible (Score:4, Funny)
Au contraire. I for one put general literacy above computer literacy. It is mre useful in the real world. Not everyone is going to be a programmer, but everyone needs to read and write.
Not to be pedantic, but I expected more from you.
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Don't you love it when grammar nazis make spelling errors?
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That's called Muphry's Law.
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Don't you love it when grammar nazis make spelling errors?
Well, that was a typo, not a spelling error.
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Lol, not sure why you are marked down, but I agree. I don't want some young whippersnapper to come in and out-program me with a K-12 education either.
The moment I can't program better than a 5th grader is the moment I start finding Jeff Foxworthy hilarious and watch reality TV exclusively.
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well educated children are less likely to respect authority
What utter bullshit.
Lack of respect comes from shitty parenting and broken families. Nannies and babysitters can't teach respect, either.
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Kids should really be taught both. TFA states that IF a school has to choose, the case can be made for programming over foreign languages. But IMHO that is by no means the ideal.
I grew up in a dual-medium environment: Some of my earliest memories are of playing with English kids and learning their language (I'm Afrikaans). I was also taught to program quite early, basically as I started to learn how to read (6 or 7 years old). I've managed to do both quite successfully. As one can hopefully confirm by readi