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What’s frustrating to me is that we haven’t found a way to teach programming that doesn’t rely on natural aptitude. It’s really a travesty that we can’t teach

by ohyes 8y ago

What’s frustrating to me is that we haven’t found a way to teach programming that doesn’t rely on natural aptitude. It’s really a travesty that we can’t teach it the same way that we teach maths or natural languages. The end result is we’re left trying to divine whether someone is the programming equivalent of being illiterate. As with illiteracy people find ways to fake it.

trhway 8y ago
using literacy model - we're testing people to write haiku according to all the rules of style and form when the job we're testing for is basically just low level clerical like copying documents (using copy machine), sometimes taking notes and filling simple forms.
gizmo686 8y ago
As someone who has studied both math and computer science (and is now a professional programmer), I have no idea what you are talking about. We are far better at teaching people to program than we are at teaching them to do math. Its just that most people self select out of math [0], so, due to selection bias, it appears that we are great at teaching those that remain. As an aside, as someone who also studied linguistics [1] (and a couple of foreign languages at a beginner level), I am very confident in saying that our approach to teaching natural languages relies almost entirely on natural aptitude. It is just that, absent a serious mental disorder, all humans have a very large natural aptitude for natural languages [0] Probably because we are absolutly terrible at teaching it. [1] I assume not what you mean by teaching natural languages, but the topic of language acuisition (including in adults) does come up; plus it gives some perspective on how teaching language would look if we didn't rely on natural aptitude.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  I took math as part of my engineering degree. And that was 30 years ago. The older I get the more I think the way it was taught was terrible. Same reason I think teachers are bitching about the US's fetish for academic testing. Testing pressures teachers to teach students to mechanically solve problems. But with shallow understanding.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    I think of monads, which are real easy to explain in a programming context as soon as someone understands lists and map/reduce, but are total gibberish in a math context even if you've gotten through calculus.
zanny 8y ago
I don't believe for a second it requires "natural aptitude" to program. The problem is any programming curriculum starts with a text editor open. If a developer-to-be doesn't understand the framing context of what they are doing they are being dropped in a lake with no sense of direction. Its why all the "naturals" started as geeks who played with computers from a young age. You learned about the environment you would end up working in and later on when you hit the grindstone and actually started creating gears to stick on that machine you had an idea what the result should look like and knew the tools in the shop when you set out to start building it. Even if you didn't know the steps involved in the process, you were familiar with the environment. People who haven't spent time engrossed in computers, such as the myriads of youth entering a cs 101 class thinking its an easy career when the most exposure to tech they have had is maybe updating their phone and using apps for Facebook and Twitter and maybe owned a video game console with no tinkerability as a total black box drop out so fast. Their professors lead them to an anvil and tell them to forge a steel rod without any wink of an idea what a hammer is. Its just not an answer anyone wants to hear, because the solution is only to have what amounts to an entire degrees worth of learning to predicate the actual study of programming. But you don't want your brain surgeon to go to medical school after having never studied high school biology or even more generally learned to read.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  We convinced our parents to buy a computer because it would help our education when all we really wanted one for was playing computer games. Joke was on us though, because playing computer games at the time usually involved a lot of putzing around and figuring out how stuff worked, ultimately teaching us marketable skills.
  - bitwize 8y ago
    I had zero games for my VIC-20. It was strictly a BASIC machine. (Later I had a TI-99/4A which had a few.) My dad is a kind of super-polymath, and in the early 80s he bought a computer and learned how to use and program it so he could grind out solutions to mechanical-engineering equations. He saw me become hooked on BASIC and went down to Crazy Eddie's to pick up the VIC for me so I wouldn't bother him on his rather expensive machine. The personal computer grew up alongside us xennials, and some of us were just drawn to it, even without the promise of video games.

by ohyes 8y ago

trhway 8y ago

using literacy model - we're testing people to write haiku according to all the rules of style and form when the job we're testing for is basically just low level clerical like copying documents (using copy machine), sometimes taking notes and filling simple forms.

gizmo686 8y ago

As someone who has studied both math and computer science (and is now a professional programmer), I have no idea what you are talking about. We are far better at teaching people to program than we are at teaching them to do math. Its just that most people self select out of math [0], so, due to selection bias, it appears that we are great at teaching those that remain. As an aside, as someone who also studied linguistics [1] (and a couple of foreign languages at a beginner level), I am very confident in saying that our approach to teaching natural languages relies almost entirely on natural aptitude. It is just that, absent a serious mental disorder, all humans have a very large natural aptitude for natural languages [0] Probably because we are absolutly terrible at teaching it. [1] I assume not what you mean by teaching natural languages, but the topic of language acuisition (including in adults) does come up; plus it gives some perspective on how teaching language would look if we didn't rely on natural aptitude.

Gibbon1 8y ago
I took math as part of my engineering degree. And that was 30 years ago. The older I get the more I think the way it was taught was terrible. Same reason I think teachers are bitching about the US's fetish for academic testing. Testing pressures teachers to teach students to mechanically solve problems. But with shallow understanding.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  I think of monads, which are real easy to explain in a programming context as soon as someone understands lists and map/reduce, but are total gibberish in a math context even if you've gotten through calculus.

zanny 8y ago

I don't believe for a second it requires "natural aptitude" to program. The problem is any programming curriculum starts with a text editor open. If a developer-to-be doesn't understand the framing context of what they are doing they are being dropped in a lake with no sense of direction. Its why all the "naturals" started as geeks who played with computers from a young age. You learned about the environment you would end up working in and later on when you hit the grindstone and actually started creating gears to stick on that machine you had an idea what the result should look like and knew the tools in the shop when you set out to start building it. Even if you didn't know the steps involved in the process, you were familiar with the environment. People who haven't spent time engrossed in computers, such as the myriads of youth entering a cs 101 class thinking its an easy career when the most exposure to tech they have had is maybe updating their phone and using apps for Facebook and Twitter and maybe owned a video game console with no tinkerability as a total black box drop out so fast. Their professors lead them to an anvil and tell them to forge a steel rod without any wink of an idea what a hammer is. Its just not an answer anyone wants to hear, because the solution is only to have what amounts to an entire degrees worth of learning to predicate the actual study of programming. But you don't want your brain surgeon to go to medical school after having never studied high school biology or even more generally learned to read.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
We convinced our parents to buy a computer because it would help our education when all we really wanted one for was playing computer games. Joke was on us though, because playing computer games at the time usually involved a lot of putzing around and figuring out how stuff worked, ultimately teaching us marketable skills.
- bitwize 8y ago
  I had zero games for my VIC-20. It was strictly a BASIC machine. (Later I had a TI-99/4A which had a few.) My dad is a kind of super-polymath, and in the early 80s he bought a computer and learned how to use and program it so he could grind out solutions to mechanical-engineering equations. He saw me become hooked on BASIC and went down to Crazy Eddie's to pick up the VIC for me so I wouldn't bother him on his rather expensive machine. The personal computer grew up alongside us xennials, and some of us were just drawn to it, even without the promise of video games.