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There sure is some truth in that procedural awareness should be higher. But I think the analogy holds. You should not teach mechanics, but you should teach natu

by jonsen 16y ago

There sure is some truth in that procedural awareness should be higher. But I think the analogy holds. You should not teach mechanics, but you should teach natural sciences in a way that principles are transferable to mechanics, and to building, and to a lot of other things. I think it's deeply wrong to try and raise procedural awareness by forcing the technicalities of state of the art programming on the common man. You should find a way to teach algorithmic principles so that they are generally applicable.

avar 16y ago
I think you need to teach these things at an early age, and teaching "algorithmic principles" while sound in theory is probably also a good way to make an entire class of children ignore you completely. The best way to teach people procedural awareness is probably to teach people to tinker with something they can start using right away. Things like automatically programming your phone to reply to your parents via SMS with some plausible responses when you're out drinking, use the Facebook API to get info about your friends that they thought wasn't accessible etc. Show how you can use rtmpdump to download your favorite music from some closed video site, or write a script for uTorrent that'll have downloaded your favorite TV episode by the time you wake up. The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be worthwhile for them in their everyday life. It's easy to demonstrate that, and it's actually true for most people, unlike other some other subjects at school which'll probably never be pertinent to the average student.
- jonsen 16y ago
  Tinkering is fine. The real problem is making abstractions and general knowledge from it. All too easily tinkering turns into nerdery, thrilling some, despicable to others.
- hoprocker 16y ago
  > The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be worthwhile for them in their everyday life. Make knowledge acquisition both a) fun and b) timely. Add a motivating situation that leads people to want/need to learn, and they will.

by jonsen 16y ago

avar 16y ago

I think you need to teach these things at an early age, and teaching "algorithmic principles" while sound in theory is probably also a good way to make an entire class of children ignore you completely. The best way to teach people procedural awareness is probably to teach people to tinker with something they can start using right away. Things like automatically programming your phone to reply to your parents via SMS with some plausible responses when you're out drinking, use the Facebook API to get info about your friends that they thought wasn't accessible etc. Show how you can use rtmpdump to download your favorite music from some closed video site, or write a script for uTorrent that'll have downloaded your favorite TV episode by the time you wake up. The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be worthwhile for them in their everyday life. It's easy to demonstrate that, and it's actually true for most people, unlike other some other subjects at school which'll probably never be pertinent to the average student.

jonsen 16y ago
Tinkering is fine. The real problem is making abstractions and general knowledge from it. All too easily tinkering turns into nerdery, thrilling some, despicable to others.
hoprocker 16y ago
> The most important thing is to show people that procedural awareness will be worthwhile for them in their everyday life. Make knowledge acquisition both a) fun and b) timely. Add a motivating situation that leads people to want/need to learn, and they will.