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I'm struggling to parse "essentially motivationally self-taught" but if you mean to say something like "only self-taught programmers will successfully learn to

I'm struggling to parse "essentially motivationally self-taught" but if you mean to say something like "only self-taught programmers will successfully learn to program" that's a myth that isn't backed up by the evidence and serves to exclude people from programming. This talk addresses that misconception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ The paper discusses "constructionism" (which, loosely put, is the idea you give someone a toy and let them figure it out): http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism.pdf http://morganya.org/research/2018-Ames-CSCW-Constructionism.... There is more out there but that's all I have time to find right now.

hhas01 7y ago
Yeah, decades of dragging myself over programming’s coals have made me super cynical, but I think that lots of programmers are really good at building tools and knowledge that are horribly inaccessible to anyone not already like them. And then being surprised and unhappy that no-one else appreciates what it is they do. If the barrier to programming is raised so high that only a career programmer can do it, all that happens is we end up with lots of users—professional experts in their own problem domains, mind—who don’t understand programming, and a bunch of professional programmers who don’t understand anything else. And then those programmers complain bitterly because they don’t understand why users hate so much the systems they’ve built for them. And yet, Seymour Papert demonstrated how to make computing open and accessible to eight year-olds, back in an age when cutting-edge HCI was a fricking Teletype! So it’s definitely an instance of PEBKAC; it’s just a matter of which chair.