8 ms·

I've been teaching kids to code for 19 years now, and I still make them do it the hard way. Just two days ago this year's crop of 83 students wrote their first

by teach 10y ago

I've been teaching kids to code for 19 years now, and I still make them do it the hard way. Just two days ago this year's crop of 83 students wrote their first Java programs in Notepad and compiled and ran it from the command-line. And I have a waiting list to get into my class. I do work with older students (aged 14-18) and the key is TREMENDOUS support. I'll happily show them the command-line stuff over and over again for a month if need be. And my curriculum goes through the basics of Java very slowly. As I've said on HN before, I make my students code FizzBuzz, but they will have literally done 106 complete programming projects before it.

bigiain 10y ago
"I make my students code FizzBuzz, but they will have literally done 106 complete programming projects before it." Pretty sure I've never met one of your students in an interview... (Just joking...)
- teach 10y ago
  I understand that you're joking, but my students deeply understand the fundamentals. They can code everything from scratch without having to Google anything or ever reference Stack Overflow. My program is very strong. Some of my former students now write code for Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Dropbox. (Haven't gotten anyone hired at Amazon yet, though!)
  - mikegerwitz 10y ago
    > They can code everything from scratch without having to Google anything or ever reference Stack Overflow. This isn't a good measure of proficiency. I frequently do both of those things---in fact, I consider it a bad thing when someone does not, because that means that they are not exploring others' solutions to the problem, or learning other methods of doing something. Struggling is a good way to learn, but at some point you should see what others are thinking, and how they are doing it better than you are. Similarly, manuals (manpages, info manuals, online resources, etc) are essential: trying to memorize every detail when certain things aren't often used is not an efficient use of one's time, and that knowledge will only fade unless applied. I think the point you were trying to get at was that for what was taught in your course, the students were proficient enough that they didn't need to reference other resources.
    - teach 10y ago
      Yes, I mean that they can code everything in my class without needing a reference. I don't make them memorize anything -- I agree that's a waste of mental capacity -- they just learn it through tremendous repetition. Once you know a half dozen programming languages then Stack Overflow and reference manuals are of course useful and I'm sure most of my former students do use them.
      - harryjo 10y ago
        > I don't make them memorize anything -- I agree that's a waste of mental capacity -- they just learn it through tremendous repetition. I don't understand. You are drilling them to memorize through repetition.
    - mikekchar 10y ago
      There is a difference between proficiency and fluency and when teaching languages it is important to distinguish them. Proficiency is a measure of how many things you can do. Fluency is the degree with which you can do something without undue thinking or planning. I don't know exactly what the parent poster had in mind, but for me fluency is what you should aim for when teaching novices. You should keep the domain very, very small and help them get to the point where they can explore it without undue effort. In human language training you get the classic example of "I can read just about anything if I have a dictionary, but a can't speak to save my life". The lack of ability to output fluently is an indication that the language has not yet been acquired. It is tempting to get students to achieve impressive results based on being able to piece together material from outside sources (Google, SO in a programming context or a dictionary and example sentences in a human language context). However, creating fluency in a small domain gives a more solid conceptual model and will ultimately serve them better IMHO.
      - mikegerwitz 10y ago
        > There is a difference between proficiency and fluency and when teaching languages it is important to distinguish them. That is important; thank you for the clarification. > fluency is what you should aim for when teaching novices I think you should aim for both, but yes this is important. An earlier thread mentioned autocompletion: use of it during early stages of learning is a good example of working against fluency.
  - jczhang 10y ago
    As someone who is studying web dev right now, i'm interested in hearing your methods and curriculum, as at least for web dev, it seems so much requires googling/using stack overflow.
mikegerwitz 10y ago
> first Java programs in Notepad Do you find this to be beneficial? What are your observations? My first impression would be the frustration with lack of simple features that programmers take for granted in their editor, like auto-indentation. I can see the benefit in deferring syntax highlighting, but something as simple as the former can be unnecessarily off-putting, and distract from learning. With that said, I try to think back to when I was learning HTML in elementary school, using Notepad to edit. I was so focused on struggling through comprehension that typing extra tabs/spaces wasn't what slowed me down. I also didn't know what I didn't know about editing. But I have observed frustration in others who didn't know how to program, pounding the tab key or spacebar. And I did forego indentation in my early days in many instances, because it was a PITA. So this isn't a criticism of your decision to have students use Notepad; I'm just curious of their feedback and your observations. Java indents virtually every line.
- robertelder 10y ago
  I taught a few programming courses (C programming) this past year at a local college and I went for basically the same route: Get them to type out small simple programs in gedit, and compile them on the command line with a simple make file. Modern programming is often so high-level and tool assisted that it is difficult for a newcomer to understand the difference between what they did and what the computer did. Many of them previously programmed using the arduino programming environment (which I haven't ever used), but I have been told that it does a lot of stuff automatically for them, they don't even write the 'main' method. Many of the students started trying to do all kinds of crazy stuff when trying to make a simple 'hello world' C program, including various Windows headers (on Linux), trying to do GPIO pin stuff etc. I think it can be beneficial to keep the number of new things as small as possible, and build up from there.
  - teach 10y ago
    I couldn't agree more. That's actually my biggest complaint with Java for true beginners; "hello word" has half a dozen concepts you can't omit but also can't even begin to explain. I just get hand-wavy and say "it's a required heading that Java requires; I'll explain it later."
mcphage 10y ago
> I do work with older students (aged 14-18) and the key is TREMENDOUS support. I'll happily show them the command-line stuff over and over again for a month if need be. I think the article was written more in relation to teaching younger children, rather than high schoolers.
- teach 10y ago
  You're right, of course. I'm not disagreeing with the article at all, actually. I agree with all five points. I wish there was some programming offered in the lower grades in my district.
tsumnia 10y ago
I've been experimenting with college students by giving them images of source code and forcing them to type out the program as their first assignment for the week. I've since gone back to earn my PhD and I hope to study this specific technique to see the empirical merit to it. I'd love to chat with you outside of HN if you have the chance!
- teach 10y ago
  I make all my students type in many assignments as well. I don't use images, though, just classroom management techniques since I have them in the room with me and I find students have less incentive to "cheat" when they know what they're doing. Shoot me an email; would be happy to discuss.
swaits 10y ago
This is really interesting! Is your curriculum open, by chance?
asimuvPR 10y ago
I work in edtech and find this fascinating. I was at ISTE last June and talked with teachers with similar experiences. In your experience, what are the top three issues students face?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
benhoyt 10y ago
Do you have your curriculum in a shareable format, or even just an outline? I'm going to start teaching programming to high schoolers soon and would love to see that.
- teach 10y ago
  These were my classroom assignments in 2012. My current assignments use my book, but the basic sequence is the same. https://programmingbydoing.com/ https://programmingbydoing.com/
- phlakaton 10y ago
  TEALS volunteer here (https://www.tealsk12.org https://www.tealsk12.org). TEALS offers its Intro to CS curricula as open textbooks: Sem 1: https://teals-introcs.gitbooks.io/introduction-to-computer-science-principles/content/index.html https://teals-introcs.gitbooks.io/introduction-to-computer-s... Sem 2: https://www.gitbook.com/book/teals-introcs/2nd-semester-introduction-to-computer-science-pri/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/teals-introcs/2nd-semester-intr... I taught this last year and had a blast. It's still a very new curriculum, so expect to have to work out some flow issues and maybe even a bug or two. In particular, doing Snap! for a whole semester I think works if you're only teaching one semester, but we wanted well more time on Python than we had.
viiralvx 10y ago
When I was learning C and C++ in college, my professor didn't show us what an IDE is until the second to last lab at the end of the school year. We were all like, "WHAT?! We were over here making Makefiles and all that when there's a piece of software that could do it for us?" But to be honest, after that, we didn't even use the IDE because we were already good at making Makefiles for our project, haha. EDIT: Just remembered writing my first C programs in nano, lmao. I really wonder how much time I lost doing that, smh. Ended up using kate later on. I just learned vim last year out of forcing myself to abandon Sublime Text/Atom and once again, productivity skyrocketed.

by teach 10y ago

bigiain 10y ago

"I make my students code FizzBuzz, but they will have literally done 106 complete programming projects before it." Pretty sure I've never met one of your students in an interview... (Just joking...)

teach 10y ago
I understand that you're joking, but my students deeply understand the fundamentals. They can code everything from scratch without having to Google anything or ever reference Stack Overflow. My program is very strong. Some of my former students now write code for Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Dropbox. (Haven't gotten anyone hired at Amazon yet, though!)
- mikegerwitz 10y ago
  > They can code everything from scratch without having to Google anything or ever reference Stack Overflow. This isn't a good measure of proficiency. I frequently do both of those things---in fact, I consider it a bad thing when someone does not, because that means that they are not exploring others' solutions to the problem, or learning other methods of doing something. Struggling is a good way to learn, but at some point you should see what others are thinking, and how they are doing it better than you are. Similarly, manuals (manpages, info manuals, online resources, etc) are essential: trying to memorize every detail when certain things aren't often used is not an efficient use of one's time, and that knowledge will only fade unless applied. I think the point you were trying to get at was that for what was taught in your course, the students were proficient enough that they didn't need to reference other resources.
  - teach 10y ago
    Yes, I mean that they can code everything in my class without needing a reference. I don't make them memorize anything -- I agree that's a waste of mental capacity -- they just learn it through tremendous repetition. Once you know a half dozen programming languages then Stack Overflow and reference manuals are of course useful and I'm sure most of my former students do use them.
    - harryjo 10y ago
      > I don't make them memorize anything -- I agree that's a waste of mental capacity -- they just learn it through tremendous repetition. I don't understand. You are drilling them to memorize through repetition.
  - mikekchar 10y ago
    There is a difference between proficiency and fluency and when teaching languages it is important to distinguish them. Proficiency is a measure of how many things you can do. Fluency is the degree with which you can do something without undue thinking or planning. I don't know exactly what the parent poster had in mind, but for me fluency is what you should aim for when teaching novices. You should keep the domain very, very small and help them get to the point where they can explore it without undue effort. In human language training you get the classic example of "I can read just about anything if I have a dictionary, but a can't speak to save my life". The lack of ability to output fluently is an indication that the language has not yet been acquired. It is tempting to get students to achieve impressive results based on being able to piece together material from outside sources (Google, SO in a programming context or a dictionary and example sentences in a human language context). However, creating fluency in a small domain gives a more solid conceptual model and will ultimately serve them better IMHO.
    - mikegerwitz 10y ago
      > There is a difference between proficiency and fluency and when teaching languages it is important to distinguish them. That is important; thank you for the clarification. > fluency is what you should aim for when teaching novices I think you should aim for both, but yes this is important. An earlier thread mentioned autocompletion: use of it during early stages of learning is a good example of working against fluency.
- jczhang 10y ago
  As someone who is studying web dev right now, i'm interested in hearing your methods and curriculum, as at least for web dev, it seems so much requires googling/using stack overflow.

mikegerwitz 10y ago

> first Java programs in Notepad Do you find this to be beneficial? What are your observations? My first impression would be the frustration with lack of simple features that programmers take for granted in their editor, like auto-indentation. I can see the benefit in deferring syntax highlighting, but something as simple as the former can be unnecessarily off-putting, and distract from learning. With that said, I try to think back to when I was learning HTML in elementary school, using Notepad to edit. I was so focused on struggling through comprehension that typing extra tabs/spaces wasn't what slowed me down. I also didn't know what I didn't know about editing. But I have observed frustration in others who didn't know how to program, pounding the tab key or spacebar. And I did forego indentation in my early days in many instances, because it was a PITA. So this isn't a criticism of your decision to have students use Notepad; I'm just curious of their feedback and your observations. Java indents virtually every line.

robertelder 10y ago
I taught a few programming courses (C programming) this past year at a local college and I went for basically the same route: Get them to type out small simple programs in gedit, and compile them on the command line with a simple make file. Modern programming is often so high-level and tool assisted that it is difficult for a newcomer to understand the difference between what they did and what the computer did. Many of them previously programmed using the arduino programming environment (which I haven't ever used), but I have been told that it does a lot of stuff automatically for them, they don't even write the 'main' method. Many of the students started trying to do all kinds of crazy stuff when trying to make a simple 'hello world' C program, including various Windows headers (on Linux), trying to do GPIO pin stuff etc. I think it can be beneficial to keep the number of new things as small as possible, and build up from there.
- teach 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more. That's actually my biggest complaint with Java for true beginners; "hello word" has half a dozen concepts you can't omit but also can't even begin to explain. I just get hand-wavy and say "it's a required heading that Java requires; I'll explain it later."

mcphage 10y ago

> I do work with older students (aged 14-18) and the key is TREMENDOUS support. I'll happily show them the command-line stuff over and over again for a month if need be. I think the article was written more in relation to teaching younger children, rather than high schoolers.

teach 10y ago
You're right, of course. I'm not disagreeing with the article at all, actually. I agree with all five points. I wish there was some programming offered in the lower grades in my district.

tsumnia 10y ago

I've been experimenting with college students by giving them images of source code and forcing them to type out the program as their first assignment for the week. I've since gone back to earn my PhD and I hope to study this specific technique to see the empirical merit to it. I'd love to chat with you outside of HN if you have the chance!

teach 10y ago
I make all my students type in many assignments as well. I don't use images, though, just classroom management techniques since I have them in the room with me and I find students have less incentive to "cheat" when they know what they're doing. Shoot me an email; would be happy to discuss.

swaits 10y ago

This is really interesting! Is your curriculum open, by chance?

asimuvPR 10y ago

I work in edtech and find this fascinating. I was at ISTE last June and talked with teachers with similar experiences. In your experience, what are the top three issues students face?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

benhoyt 10y ago

Do you have your curriculum in a shareable format, or even just an outline? I'm going to start teaching programming to high schoolers soon and would love to see that.

teach 10y ago
These were my classroom assignments in 2012. My current assignments use my book, but the basic sequence is the same. https://programmingbydoing.com/ https://programmingbydoing.com/
phlakaton 10y ago
TEALS volunteer here (https://www.tealsk12.org https://www.tealsk12.org). TEALS offers its Intro to CS curricula as open textbooks: Sem 1: https://teals-introcs.gitbooks.io/introduction-to-computer-science-principles/content/index.html https://teals-introcs.gitbooks.io/introduction-to-computer-s... Sem 2: https://www.gitbook.com/book/teals-introcs/2nd-semester-introduction-to-computer-science-pri/details https://www.gitbook.com/book/teals-introcs/2nd-semester-intr... I taught this last year and had a blast. It's still a very new curriculum, so expect to have to work out some flow issues and maybe even a bug or two. In particular, doing Snap! for a whole semester I think works if you're only teaching one semester, but we wanted well more time on Python than we had.

viiralvx 10y ago

When I was learning C and C++ in college, my professor didn't show us what an IDE is until the second to last lab at the end of the school year. We were all like, "WHAT?! We were over here making Makefiles and all that when there's a piece of software that could do it for us?" But to be honest, after that, we didn't even use the IDE because we were already good at making Makefiles for our project, haha. EDIT: Just remembered writing my first C programs in nano, lmao. I really wonder how much time I lost doing that, smh. Ended up using kate later on. I just learned vim last year out of forcing myself to abandon Sublime Text/Atom and once again, productivity skyrocketed.