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The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines having basic/asm code for interesting programs or games. You had to retype them to run them. It wa

The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines having basic/asm code for interesting programs or games. You had to retype them to run them. It was slightly before my time, but I suspect a large number of people got through the "learn the tooling" stage simply by retyping, looking for the mis-type when they got it wrong, and learning how to understand the feedback. The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. All of a sudden you're learning how the whole program and environment work together and can always go back to a known good state by retyping what the paper says.

tsumnia 5y ago
> The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines YUP! I've been collecting the old Usbourne and Micro Adventure books and typically bring them along when I give presentations to say "This is how they did it in the old days! Let's do it again!" I then compare it to other "technical" skills like playing an instrument, acting, and martial arts. Each one has a "you gotta memorize/drill this" phase that is imperative to higher level performance, creativity, or problem solving. > The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. There is some work out of the UK known as PRIMM that uses this as one of their initial steps [1]. I spoke with Sue Sentance at SIGCSE in 2017 when she presented her studies and it sounds like another cool way to present coding practice without problem solving. John Edwards out of Utah is also doing "simple syntax exercises" [2] for his style of drilling where you have students do 20-30 exercises on a concept without very minor changes like "make the loop go 3 times; now 4; now go backwards from 4 to 0; etc.". [1] https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-approach-to-teaching-programming/ https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-a... [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259

tsumnia 5y ago

> The typing exercises remind me of 80s/90s computer magazines YUP! I've been collecting the old Usbourne and Micro Adventure books and typically bring them along when I give presentations to say "This is how they did it in the old days! Let's do it again!" I then compare it to other "technical" skills like playing an instrument, acting, and martial arts. Each one has a "you gotta memorize/drill this" phase that is imperative to higher level performance, creativity, or problem solving. > The natural next thing to do is to try to change some values and see what happens. There is some work out of the UK known as PRIMM that uses this as one of their initial steps [1]. I spoke with Sue Sentance at SIGCSE in 2017 when she presented her studies and it sounds like another cool way to present coding practice without problem solving. John Edwards out of Utah is also doing "simple syntax exercises" [2] for his style of drilling where you have students do 20-30 exercises on a concept without very minor changes like "make the loop go 3 times; now 4; now go backwards from 4 to 0; etc.". [1] https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-approach-to-teaching-programming/ https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cser/2017/09/01/primm-a-structured-a... [2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259 https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3372782.3406259