7 ms·

Coding for Kids Is Not Just Another Fad

35 points by teragoodness 6y ago

yepthatsreality 6y ago
I have never heard coding referred to as a fad. Maybe it appears that way from the outside in the way that we support it in the US. The bigger issue is that we keep cutting education and lack literacy and computer literacy. Computer courses should’ve always included coding for all students. Instead we teach them how to use ever evolving office suites in an attempt to prepare people, which doesn’t give them the skills to use any new or changed software. Kids should be learning debugging and coding at a young age.
- chansiky 6y ago
  Yeah this is a big problem, courses shouldn't turn into how to use Excel/Word/Photoshop. I think there is room for those types of courses, but our education system just hasn't caught up with how to integrate technical software how-to's with a course that teaches a core topic.
jnwatson 6y ago
Coding was an embedded aspect of the primary and secondary school mathematics curriculum through my (United States)public school education in the 80s and early 90s. In primary school, once every week or two we'd spend a class in the computer lab full of TRS-80s to work on Snake (a Logo variant). In high school, I took 3 programming courses. Did programming for kids go away and come back?
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  As a rural Canadian student the closest I came to programming was the Turtle Drawer on a Apple IIe in elementary in the early 90's and then HTML in high school at the turn of the millenium. There were no resources to do more and the teachers had no education in it.
  - lolptdr 6y ago
    Very similar experience to me. I grew up in the 90s in a suburb of Dallas, TX. The most interesting things we did in elementary school was play Oregon Trail on Apple IIe and make obnoxious sounds in Kid Pix once we upgraded to iMacs. In High School, a CS curriculum existed but hardly any interest or marketing the AP CS classes were made. HTML and web development classes started to make its way in late 90s.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Expectations in schools (for both what teachers could or should teach, and what students should be exposed to) changed. I think by the 90s priorities had shifted enough (and general exposure to computers was on the rise due to their increasing ubiquity) that teachers were refocused on other things. That was also the start of (in the US) the much stronger emphasis on "teaching to the test" (it existed before, but was getting worse). You had cutbacks in many parts of the school (like music, some athletics, arts, even shop) in order to maintain focus on the core subjects of math, English, history, and science.
- asdff 6y ago
  There was no programming at all over the course of my education (started school in 1997). It wasn't even offered. Everyone who went on to major in computer science in college was self taught and self motivated. Instead our computer education was focused on typing skills and microsoft office. I'm not sure what people are learning today. I was working with an undergrad recently, and had to teach him how to copy text from a log file and paste it into a notepad file and save it. The kid had no clue what to do, because he was raised on mobile devices which doesn't really have a concept of text files. Computer literacy has fallen by the wayside in education, and the writing has been on the wall for at least two decades now.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  Computers gained "multimedia" and the programming complexity to replicate all of the professional level programs increased dramatically. The BASIC prompt on a TRS-80 isn't as far removed from the everyday programs you would run on such machines. Why bother with programming when you have all these fancy distractions?
- sumtechguy 6y ago
  That was the same question I had! I wonder if it was more regional or which school system you were in? I started stuff in 5th grade in the early 80s on a TI99. The thing is it seems everyone even then wanted in on it. But not everyone could do it. Even fewer liked it. I do not see how that has changed much either. I ran a class for programmers a few years ago. By the 10th class they had all dropped out due to a lack of time and interest. I took and taught the class because I found the topic interesting. They seemed to only want in if it gave them some sort of advancement in their job. It would have if they had stuck it out. But it became 'too hard'.
patorjk 6y ago
I wonder if part of the problem of integrating coding classes into schools is that anyone who has the ability to teach coding could probably get a much higher paying job outside of the school. So the quality of instruction in middle/high school isn't very good. In middle school one of my friends installed the shareware version of Doom onto several computers and the teacher had no idea how to uninstall it. So we were able to play it when she wasn't looking. In high school, my QBasic teacher left half way through the semester to check herself into a mental institution, and the school's follow up course, introduction to C++, was cancelled since only 4 people signed up. There just wasn't good instruction, and I think that led to there being lower interest. However, I only have my own data points to go by.
- jimlikeslimes 6y ago
  My programming teacher at age 16 directly answered this as a rhetorical question to the class. He just said, I love teaching, I love living here (no tech sector), and I love programming. He found teaching 16-18 year olds programming really rewarding. I found him a realy great teacher. He didn't want the stress of moving to a city and programming for others. That was 20 years ago though. It might be different now.
  - dpeck 6y ago
    That was before a good developer who can pass interviews and get a promotion or two could make 3x (easily) to 10x (if a few things went their way) as a teacher. There are some people who love teaching enough to make that trade off, and it’s wonderful that they exist, but they’re going to be exceptionally rare.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      > they’re going to be exceptionally rare. Disagree - at least in my experience in urban school districts, they were definitely the majority of good teachers.
      - ravi-delia 6y ago
runawaybottle 6y ago
I’d be careful about teaching foundational coding or significant literature too early. Not everyone has superior intelligence (I certainly don’t, but that should go without saying for most, perhaps not here since the bell curve is outta whack on HN) and if you take on abstract or tough material too early, you could associate a discomfort from the struggles of being bad at it initially. It’s kind of one of the reasons people basically look at reading like it’s the worst thing on Earth because they get hit with Shakespeare too early, and this develops life long habits of non-reading. Making these habits sustainable is more important initially. You’ll lose a generation of kids if you start them on raw CS. Something to think about, because ultimately we want more people that get into it because they really wanna make games or apps, vs the current reality of ‘hey this field pays and others don’t’. But this is the ideal we want for all disciplines.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  One way to mitigate the challenge is to make it ungraded. It's an opportunity to explore a subject, not a chance to get an A or yet another F. The way that we want to attach a score (and the consequent impact of that) for every activity is what creates a lot of strife for learners. It's bad enough that the material is challenging, but worse when a poor grade means yet another parent teacher conference or letter home or remedial course.
  - runawaybottle 6y ago
    Sure, so the one magic bullet we have as a field is that we can pretty much woah them with the possibilities of learning this stuff. So you play Fortnite or sit on Reddit all day? This is how you build that. A good simple game engine would do wonders for programming education. Take something like React, not exactly a learners platform either. We never really build apis like that anymore (or ever have it seems), where we literally ask ‘could a kid do this?’.
    - watwut 6y ago
      Issue with games is that it is much less fun to make them. It also have strong artistic component that discourages non artistic kids. It is often tedious to test. Just because someone likes programming does not imply he will enjoy actual making game. It is good to attract kids to at first, but not so great after. Also, just because someone enjoys playing games does not imply he has any motivation to quite code for game. People mostly fall love with visuals or story or online competition. Which leads to drawing, modeling and writing or level design more.
Spinnaker_ 6y ago
My wife has been teaching coding to kids for a few years now. Her prediction, or worry, is that it will end up looking a lot like math education: A few students excel while the majority of the class see it as an endless source of frustration and quickly learn to hate it. And then discussions like these are almost exclusively held by the minority who excelled.
- znpy 6y ago
  In a way, it's already like that.
  - asdff 6y ago
    Especially considering how much math is required for a computer science education. It scared me off, and I became exposed to programming through another field which was far more pleasant due to avoiding all that horribly difficult math.
- jshier 6y ago
  Aren't all subjects at school like that? Isn't this expected with general education before allowing students to specialize? I wouldn't think it's possible to teach every subject in a way that every student enjoys it.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    They might not enjoy it, but if you miss (or fake understanding) a year of high school social studies or language arts, you can still function in the class the next year (maybe with a little bit less practice). The issue I see people run into in math classes specifically is that the curriculum builds on the past heavily enough that if you miss a key insight, you might never catch up (unless someone can take the time to help you restore that ability).
    - ghaff 6y ago
      At some point, you learn bad habits, reading comprehension, and writing quality are subpar. But even the different sciences are mostly independent. With math--which is a foundation for physics too of course, while there are a few areas like geometric proofs that I didn't get along with and mostly didn't come back to, math does tend to build on itself to a large degree. And if you get too far behind, it gets increasingly hard to keep progressing.
ArtWomb 6y ago
"Coding" as a subject is emerging with all the requisite teacher training materials, state board approved curricula, etc. It bears about as much resemblance to actual software engineering or even hobbyist programming as the AP CS exam does ;) The best experience I've had so far is just creating simple games and simulations in Processing (P5JS) with kids. The online IDE is very forgiving. But as of yet, I don't think there is really a set of instructions that allow them to think like a Computer Scientist. In many aspects, 1980s style Turtle Graphics and DOS BASIC were more advanced "mind-openers" https://editor.p5js.org/ https://editor.p5js.org/
- watwut 6y ago
  The goal is not and should not be too make kid think like engineer. Not in the first step. They first need to start thinking in steps, loops, commands, ifs. Understand it does what you wrote.
  - xmprt 6y ago
    I've noticed that a lot of beginners get tripped up on the syntax. Unfortunately a lot of the fun problem solving parts of coding only come after you get over that hurdle. I don't think the visual editors where you drag and drop code blocks work as well but I can't think of a better way to solve the problem.
  - ticmasta 6y ago
    >> They first need to start thinking in steps, loops, commands, ifs This is exactly what turtle logo does, with the modest, easily definable, straight-forward goal of drawing cool pictures. I think one of the big mistakes we're making with kids is telling them "you can build awesome video games with almost no work". Well, a video game to my kids is Zelda or Halo. Nobody is building those games over an afternoon in scratch. Coding may be easier, but it's still hard work.
    - jjeaff 6y ago
      Ya, I think that is definitely important. You need to get started with something that can give you quick feedback. I remember one of my first little qbasic programs could output colors on the screen with different tones as it changed. It was probably 10 or 15 lines of code and hitting that key to run the program on a loop was like a little drug high. I was hooked and I could see the endless possibilities of what I could create by just modifying what I already had on screen. Had my first foray into programming been a terminal and a book about C, I most definitely wouldn't have stuck with it.
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
>It can be applied to almost everything that students are learning If nothing else, this seems like a reason for it. I’d add: “It encourages precise thinking.” (Which is nearly the “computational” thinking in OP, but IMO different)
- njarboe 6y ago
  “It encourages precise thinking.” This is especially useful as geometry proofs are no longer taught in the standard geometry classes in US high schools.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    Really? When did they drop that? That's not a detail I've heard from my math teacher friends, but other things have convinced me that I'll be teaching my own children math separately from what their school covers (general delays in certain topics, such as long division, basic algebra, and other things getting pushed back 1-3 grade levels versus even 10 years ago).
hardwaregeek 6y ago
My teacher managed to get our entire school of over 3,200 kids to take an intro CS class that used Racket and NetLogo. I still think that's the most insane, brilliant accomplishment. He managed to get everybody in this school to learn Lisp. Of course a lot of people found it awful and boring and confusing, but it's still a mad genius accomplishment. I'm skeptical of teaching CS to kids because I'm not sure we know how to teach it to college students. As far as I can tell, we have a strict divide between people who can write code and people who can breathe code. And the people who breathe code rarely, if ever, learn from their courses as much as from themselves. I suppose exposing more kids earlier will get them to start teaching themselves, but perhaps we can do it outside of a classroom format. I'm imagining a more free system where kids can explore a variety of activities, some of which are programming influenced. Like a set chunk of computer time with some programming options, some writing options, some film options, etc. Digital Montessori, so to speak.
tmaly 6y ago
I have been teaching a few lessons to kids in Scratch on how to code. I recently read A Mathematician's Lament and it gave me pause to consider if my approach to teaching could be changed. I think a better goal would be to teach kids to think on their own. They need something that keeps them interested and curious.
sigsergv 6y ago
There is one huge weak point in coding teaching: almost none of places where kids could publish their works. I'm not talking about simple code snippets but something bigger like real desktop, web or mobile application. There are some nice places in game industry, mostly addons for popular games. And besides that - literally nothing. You can easily publish music, video, writing, but not working and ready to use software project.

35 points by teragoodness 6y ago

I have never heard coding referred to as a fad. Maybe it appears that way from the outside in the way that we support it in the US. The bigger issue is that we keep cutting education and lack literacy and computer literacy. Computer courses should’ve always included coding for all students. Instead we teach them how to use ever evolving office suites in an attempt to prepare people, which doesn’t give them the skills to use any new or changed software. Kids should be learning debugging and coding at a young age.

chansiky 6y ago
Yeah this is a big problem, courses shouldn't turn into how to use Excel/Word/Photoshop. I think there is room for those types of courses, but our education system just hasn't caught up with how to integrate technical software how-to's with a course that teaches a core topic.

jnwatson 6y ago

Coding was an embedded aspect of the primary and secondary school mathematics curriculum through my (United States)public school education in the 80s and early 90s. In primary school, once every week or two we'd spend a class in the computer lab full of TRS-80s to work on Snake (a Logo variant). In high school, I took 3 programming courses. Did programming for kids go away and come back?

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
As a rural Canadian student the closest I came to programming was the Turtle Drawer on a Apple IIe in elementary in the early 90's and then HTML in high school at the turn of the millenium. There were no resources to do more and the teachers had no education in it.
- lolptdr 6y ago
  Very similar experience to me. I grew up in the 90s in a suburb of Dallas, TX. The most interesting things we did in elementary school was play Oregon Trail on Apple IIe and make obnoxious sounds in Kid Pix once we upgraded to iMacs. In High School, a CS curriculum existed but hardly any interest or marketing the AP CS classes were made. HTML and web development classes started to make its way in late 90s.
Jtsummers 6y ago
Expectations in schools (for both what teachers could or should teach, and what students should be exposed to) changed. I think by the 90s priorities had shifted enough (and general exposure to computers was on the rise due to their increasing ubiquity) that teachers were refocused on other things. That was also the start of (in the US) the much stronger emphasis on "teaching to the test" (it existed before, but was getting worse). You had cutbacks in many parts of the school (like music, some athletics, arts, even shop) in order to maintain focus on the core subjects of math, English, history, and science.
asdff 6y ago
There was no programming at all over the course of my education (started school in 1997). It wasn't even offered. Everyone who went on to major in computer science in college was self taught and self motivated. Instead our computer education was focused on typing skills and microsoft office. I'm not sure what people are learning today. I was working with an undergrad recently, and had to teach him how to copy text from a log file and paste it into a notepad file and save it. The kid had no clue what to do, because he was raised on mobile devices which doesn't really have a concept of text files. Computer literacy has fallen by the wayside in education, and the writing has been on the wall for at least two decades now.
kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
Computers gained "multimedia" and the programming complexity to replicate all of the professional level programs increased dramatically. The BASIC prompt on a TRS-80 isn't as far removed from the everyday programs you would run on such machines. Why bother with programming when you have all these fancy distractions?
sumtechguy 6y ago
That was the same question I had! I wonder if it was more regional or which school system you were in? I started stuff in 5th grade in the early 80s on a TI99. The thing is it seems everyone even then wanted in on it. But not everyone could do it. Even fewer liked it. I do not see how that has changed much either. I ran a class for programmers a few years ago. By the 10th class they had all dropped out due to a lack of time and interest. I took and taught the class because I found the topic interesting. They seemed to only want in if it gave them some sort of advancement in their job. It would have if they had stuck it out. But it became 'too hard'.

patorjk 6y ago

I wonder if part of the problem of integrating coding classes into schools is that anyone who has the ability to teach coding could probably get a much higher paying job outside of the school. So the quality of instruction in middle/high school isn't very good. In middle school one of my friends installed the shareware version of Doom onto several computers and the teacher had no idea how to uninstall it. So we were able to play it when she wasn't looking. In high school, my QBasic teacher left half way through the semester to check herself into a mental institution, and the school's follow up course, introduction to C++, was cancelled since only 4 people signed up. There just wasn't good instruction, and I think that led to there being lower interest. However, I only have my own data points to go by.

jimlikeslimes 6y ago
My programming teacher at age 16 directly answered this as a rhetorical question to the class. He just said, I love teaching, I love living here (no tech sector), and I love programming. He found teaching 16-18 year olds programming really rewarding. I found him a realy great teacher. He didn't want the stress of moving to a city and programming for others. That was 20 years ago though. It might be different now.
- dpeck 6y ago
  That was before a good developer who can pass interviews and get a promotion or two could make 3x (easily) to 10x (if a few things went their way) as a teacher. There are some people who love teaching enough to make that trade off, and it’s wonderful that they exist, but they’re going to be exceptionally rare.
  - MiroF 6y ago
    > they’re going to be exceptionally rare. Disagree - at least in my experience in urban school districts, they were definitely the majority of good teachers.
    - ravi-delia 6y ago

runawaybottle 6y ago

I’d be careful about teaching foundational coding or significant literature too early. Not everyone has superior intelligence (I certainly don’t, but that should go without saying for most, perhaps not here since the bell curve is outta whack on HN) and if you take on abstract or tough material too early, you could associate a discomfort from the struggles of being bad at it initially. It’s kind of one of the reasons people basically look at reading like it’s the worst thing on Earth because they get hit with Shakespeare too early, and this develops life long habits of non-reading. Making these habits sustainable is more important initially. You’ll lose a generation of kids if you start them on raw CS. Something to think about, because ultimately we want more people that get into it because they really wanna make games or apps, vs the current reality of ‘hey this field pays and others don’t’. But this is the ideal we want for all disciplines.

Jtsummers 6y ago
One way to mitigate the challenge is to make it ungraded. It's an opportunity to explore a subject, not a chance to get an A or yet another F. The way that we want to attach a score (and the consequent impact of that) for every activity is what creates a lot of strife for learners. It's bad enough that the material is challenging, but worse when a poor grade means yet another parent teacher conference or letter home or remedial course.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  Sure, so the one magic bullet we have as a field is that we can pretty much woah them with the possibilities of learning this stuff. So you play Fortnite or sit on Reddit all day? This is how you build that. A good simple game engine would do wonders for programming education. Take something like React, not exactly a learners platform either. We never really build apis like that anymore (or ever have it seems), where we literally ask ‘could a kid do this?’.
  - watwut 6y ago
    Issue with games is that it is much less fun to make them. It also have strong artistic component that discourages non artistic kids. It is often tedious to test. Just because someone likes programming does not imply he will enjoy actual making game. It is good to attract kids to at first, but not so great after. Also, just because someone enjoys playing games does not imply he has any motivation to quite code for game. People mostly fall love with visuals or story or online competition. Which leads to drawing, modeling and writing or level design more.

Spinnaker_ 6y ago

My wife has been teaching coding to kids for a few years now. Her prediction, or worry, is that it will end up looking a lot like math education: A few students excel while the majority of the class see it as an endless source of frustration and quickly learn to hate it. And then discussions like these are almost exclusively held by the minority who excelled.

znpy 6y ago
In a way, it's already like that.
- asdff 6y ago
  Especially considering how much math is required for a computer science education. It scared me off, and I became exposed to programming through another field which was far more pleasant due to avoiding all that horribly difficult math.
jshier 6y ago
Aren't all subjects at school like that? Isn't this expected with general education before allowing students to specialize? I wouldn't think it's possible to teach every subject in a way that every student enjoys it.
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  They might not enjoy it, but if you miss (or fake understanding) a year of high school social studies or language arts, you can still function in the class the next year (maybe with a little bit less practice). The issue I see people run into in math classes specifically is that the curriculum builds on the past heavily enough that if you miss a key insight, you might never catch up (unless someone can take the time to help you restore that ability).
  - ghaff 6y ago
    At some point, you learn bad habits, reading comprehension, and writing quality are subpar. But even the different sciences are mostly independent. With math--which is a foundation for physics too of course, while there are a few areas like geometric proofs that I didn't get along with and mostly didn't come back to, math does tend to build on itself to a large degree. And if you get too far behind, it gets increasingly hard to keep progressing.

ArtWomb 6y ago

"Coding" as a subject is emerging with all the requisite teacher training materials, state board approved curricula, etc. It bears about as much resemblance to actual software engineering or even hobbyist programming as the AP CS exam does ;) The best experience I've had so far is just creating simple games and simulations in Processing (P5JS) with kids. The online IDE is very forgiving. But as of yet, I don't think there is really a set of instructions that allow them to think like a Computer Scientist. In many aspects, 1980s style Turtle Graphics and DOS BASIC were more advanced "mind-openers" https://editor.p5js.org/ https://editor.p5js.org/

watwut 6y ago
The goal is not and should not be too make kid think like engineer. Not in the first step. They first need to start thinking in steps, loops, commands, ifs. Understand it does what you wrote.
- xmprt 6y ago
  I've noticed that a lot of beginners get tripped up on the syntax. Unfortunately a lot of the fun problem solving parts of coding only come after you get over that hurdle. I don't think the visual editors where you drag and drop code blocks work as well but I can't think of a better way to solve the problem.
- ticmasta 6y ago
  >> They first need to start thinking in steps, loops, commands, ifs This is exactly what turtle logo does, with the modest, easily definable, straight-forward goal of drawing cool pictures. I think one of the big mistakes we're making with kids is telling them "you can build awesome video games with almost no work". Well, a video game to my kids is Zelda or Halo. Nobody is building those games over an afternoon in scratch. Coding may be easier, but it's still hard work.
  - jjeaff 6y ago
    Ya, I think that is definitely important. You need to get started with something that can give you quick feedback. I remember one of my first little qbasic programs could output colors on the screen with different tones as it changed. It was probably 10 or 15 lines of code and hitting that key to run the program on a loop was like a little drug high. I was hooked and I could see the endless possibilities of what I could create by just modifying what I already had on screen. Had my first foray into programming been a terminal and a book about C, I most definitely wouldn't have stuck with it.

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

>It can be applied to almost everything that students are learning If nothing else, this seems like a reason for it. I’d add: “It encourages precise thinking.” (Which is nearly the “computational” thinking in OP, but IMO different)

njarboe 6y ago
“It encourages precise thinking.” This is especially useful as geometry proofs are no longer taught in the standard geometry classes in US high schools.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Really? When did they drop that? That's not a detail I've heard from my math teacher friends, but other things have convinced me that I'll be teaching my own children math separately from what their school covers (general delays in certain topics, such as long division, basic algebra, and other things getting pushed back 1-3 grade levels versus even 10 years ago).

hardwaregeek 6y ago

My teacher managed to get our entire school of over 3,200 kids to take an intro CS class that used Racket and NetLogo. I still think that's the most insane, brilliant accomplishment. He managed to get everybody in this school to learn Lisp. Of course a lot of people found it awful and boring and confusing, but it's still a mad genius accomplishment. I'm skeptical of teaching CS to kids because I'm not sure we know how to teach it to college students. As far as I can tell, we have a strict divide between people who can write code and people who can breathe code. And the people who breathe code rarely, if ever, learn from their courses as much as from themselves. I suppose exposing more kids earlier will get them to start teaching themselves, but perhaps we can do it outside of a classroom format. I'm imagining a more free system where kids can explore a variety of activities, some of which are programming influenced. Like a set chunk of computer time with some programming options, some writing options, some film options, etc. Digital Montessori, so to speak.

tmaly 6y ago

I have been teaching a few lessons to kids in Scratch on how to code. I recently read A Mathematician's Lament and it gave me pause to consider if my approach to teaching could be changed. I think a better goal would be to teach kids to think on their own. They need something that keeps them interested and curious.

sigsergv 6y ago

There is one huge weak point in coding teaching: almost none of places where kids could publish their works. I'm not talking about simple code snippets but something bigger like real desktop, web or mobile application. There are some nice places in game industry, mostly addons for popular games. And besides that - literally nothing. You can easily publish music, video, writing, but not working and ready to use software project.