6 ms·

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed o

Back in the early 2000's, I taught "computers" to a bunch of kids in DC. I first started off with how a computer work; IO, CPU, storage and their eyes glazed over. I quickly ditched that topic and went right to building a web page. Taught them a few HTML tags and they instantly became "webmasters". They were so thrilled. They could create blinking text, could make all the fonts pink. All just by moving around some simple text in NotePad. Most importantly, they were creating things that they thought were only able to be created by "scientists". I loved how it boosted their own self worth. I've stopped teaching a long time ago. Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. Maybe it is a time gone by.

fartcannon 4y ago
You can still just use HTML.
- diamondo25 4y ago
  At least the doctype is simple nowadays. The XHTML one was horrendous.
  - laristine 4y ago
    Horrendous yes, but it was necessary, because without it we wouldn't have had the nice doctype HTML5 today. It addressed a lot of problems found in the early html and paved way for standardization and a path forward.
- jerf 4y ago
  This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.
  - eli 4y ago
    It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed. The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple storage quota probably goes a long way.
    - sph 4y ago
      Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work. It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.
      - 411111111111111 4y ago
        Thank goodness you don't need to do any of that then. If all you want is to host static html, then any free hosting service will suffice. I.e. let them create a GitHub account and show them git add / git commit / git push and you're done.
        fartcannon 4y ago
        If you can use git, you can run a webserver. It's all just right there waiting for you.
      - eli 4y ago
        That's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure. It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.
        fartcannon 4y ago
mathieuh 4y ago
When I was in primary school, at around 10- or 11-years-old there was a popular website that gave you a homepage and had challenges for doing things like making the header a certain size or having images and so on, I remember thinking it was really cool I think it was called Grid<something> or <Something>grid, I just had a look but couldn't find it Think it was somehow linked to schools, this was in the UK around 2005
bryanlarsen 4y ago
> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. I can't answer that for a 13 year old, but I can for an 8 year old. Minecraft. The elaborate stuff my daughter built at that age is way more gratifying than anything I could have built as an 8 year old.
- Steltek 4y ago
  My then-5yo built rollercoasters single handed. I helped embellish it with trigger driven fireworks and other stuff for some combo quality time and screen time. Minecraft is such a perfect game for little kids and it works "offline" pretty well.
mattwad 4y ago
I took a summer class in C++ in middle school and ditched programming for probably 5 years before coming back when i learned I could make games with my TI calculator :)
sirl1on 4y ago
> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. Lego MindStorms! There's a lab at my local university filled with Lego and basic robot sensors/actuators. Schools and other community clubs can book one-time or regular workshops. What fascinates me the most is the adaptability to the students' abilities. Young students can do "block based programming", telling the robot what to do with very simple command blocks that connect to each other. With rising profession, advanced blocks can be made available that are more powerful, resembling software control structures. New sensors can be used and robots are built by the students themselves instead of prebuilt. At some point, you can ditch the graphical block based programming and show the generated Java code and introduce the students to basic software development.
0_____0 4y ago
My first experience of programming was walking up to an Apple II in grade school (this was in the 2000s, those were some old machines) and punching in code listing from a book. The machines didn't do anything when you powered them on, just waited for you to enter code or commands. It was so simple, and it just begged you to start writing programs. Now people talk about getting their kids started with programming, and end up talking about raspberry pis and Linux distros and whatnot. Granted the tools now are so much more powerful, and a determined kid can write a best selling iPhone app, but there's something wonderful about a machine that shows up to you as a blank slate, awaiting instruction.
- shagie 4y ago
  > The machines didn't do anything when you powered them on, just waited for you to enter code or commands. I am reminded of the old Kids React videos (which themselves are now nearly a decade old)... Kids React to Technology (an old Apple ][+) https://youtu.be/PF7EpEnglgk https://youtu.be/PF7EpEnglgk
- piva00 4y ago
  Same way I got interested in programming, except instead of an Apple II (which was prohibitively expensive and rare in Brazil with import substitution in the 90s) I had access to my dad's Gradiente MSX and manuals for BASIC. When you boot up a MSX it was the same: a straight command line waiting for inputs, learning to command that was quite magical for 8 year-old me and my intro to programming in general.
- edenlinger 4y ago
  Similar story but newer hardware. I was given a machine built with left over parts from the IT company my did did sales for. Booted right to the CLI. I was given a giant red hat manual and told to have fun. It was awesome.
mch82 4y ago
Checkout Firefox Developer Edition, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ Create an HTML file and open it up in the browser without a web server (though some advanced stuff will need a web server running). The developer tools built into the browser can be used to interact with the page and see how changing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript affects it. Web console can be used to experiment with JavaScript, https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_console/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_co...
- Snowworm 4y ago
  It doesn't even need to be developer edition. That is more geared towards extension development rather than web page development.
LecroJS 4y ago
I tutor kids in my free time from ages 4 up to college. I find that Processing/p5.js is a great tool for teaching younger kids how to use their imagination through the vessel of built-in functions + tweaking arguments to instantly see their input on the canvas in the form of bright, flashy colors/shapes. It requires a much more hands on approach and can really only be done well in 1 on 1 settings. While I wish there was a way for me to be less of a navigator in terms of the amount of code that goes on the screen, I have come to find that kids are generally exceptional at pattern recognition. Even my student that is 4 (although he’s a smart kid) is capable of writing his own scripts now without much guidance in his logic/syntax. I had my own start with micro worlds as a kid, and played with netlogo in a college class. That made me a staunch supporter of kids getting into code through agent/turtle based environments
- JacobThreeThree 4y ago
  I agree, Processing/p5.js is great for beginner programming.
multiplegeorges 4y ago
Glitch (https://glitch.com https://glitch.com) is the closest thing I can think of right now.
rchaud 4y ago
At some point in 2013 I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general. I just wanted to make a website to start off with, just a bunch of linked pages. I already knew a tiny bit of HTML from college, but that was years ago and I wanted to know what had changed. So you can imagine my confusion watching that CS50 lecture as it was seemingly covering everything EXCEPT the stuff non-technical end users are familiar with: websites, apps and games. Yes, yes, I now know that CS isn't about coding but about underlying fundamentals. But that doesn't change the reality that CS50 online has been viewed many, many more times than people who've sat in a CS class, and those people likely had similarly simple goals as I did. Long story short however, I took a video course on webdev and learned far more in terms of immediately applicable skills. Again, I wasn't trying to get hired at FAANG. I just wanted to get to the level of 'webmaster', where I knew just enough to handle markup, hosting, SSL and CRUD functions. Learning by doing has been far more rewarding than following online courses.
- extra88 4y ago
  > I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general. That was not good advice. CS50 is an excellent, introductory, survey CS course but it's still a CS course.
  - rchaud 4y ago
    Most advice aimed at absolute beginners is bad, because the questions are bad. E.g. "what's the best programming language?" You and I may know that the question is a bad one, but beginners don't know that. And when they ask, they aren't told to rephrase the question as "What would I like to build?" Someone will just say "well I know Javascript and...." and it goes from there.
salawat 4y ago
Man, I loved the whole process of learning about IRQ's address spaces, I/O, North and South bridge, DMA... I didn't know a lick of programming, but just knowing how to trace the 0's and 1's through the hardware greatly boosted my confidence in interacting with the computer. No matter what program or language got put in front of me, I knew that something on a disk or in memory, or in some storage somewhere was telling the computer to do it. Then I set out to understand the people who wrote those things and what they set out to do. Then I realized I probably hated most of you. Because you went out of the way to make having my computer do what I wanted harder. I'm somewhat reluctant to encourage youngsters down the path. I'm not sure it's the healthiest occupation.

fartcannon 4y ago

You can still just use HTML.

diamondo25 4y ago
At least the doctype is simple nowadays. The XHTML one was horrendous.
- laristine 4y ago
  Horrendous yes, but it was necessary, because without it we wouldn't have had the nice doctype HTML5 today. It addressed a lot of problems found in the early html and paved way for standardization and a path forward.
jerf 4y ago
This does indeed work fine. The major problem is still finding somewhere to host it, and incurring the still non-trivial risks thereto, since among the many things students want to do with free web space, hosting warez and other things that will get you in trouble quickly is still pretty far up the list. Plus someone has to pay for a domain name or something. If you can get a modern text editor that can use SSH or something to mount a remote directory you can easily have an HTML party like it's 1999. That's easier than ever. But the surrounding issues are worse than they were in 1999, unfortunately.
- eli 4y ago
  It's never been easier to host a webpage than it is today. You can host 100s of student sites on a $5/month VPS. The free tier of AWS/GCP/etc are extremely capable. There are free services like Wix and Glitch that let you build a webpage and then mess with the HTML, no domain name needed. The problem of warez is certainly no worse than it was 30 years ago, and there are much better tools to address it. A simple storage quota probably goes a long way.
  - sph 4y ago
    Signing up to and using AWS or GCP is orders of magnitude more complex than those old free hosting services where you got an FTP username and a password. In fact you could upload directly from Frontpage IIRC, but I could never get it to work. It's simpler for us software engineers, less simple for the snot-nosed webmaster wannabes we were.
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      Thank goodness you don't need to do any of that then. If all you want is to host static html, then any free hosting service will suffice. I.e. let them create a GitHub account and show them git add / git commit / git push and you're done.
      - fartcannon 4y ago
        If you can use git, you can run a webserver. It's all just right there waiting for you.
    - eli 4y ago
      That's because someone did the work of setting up a server for you, configuring the services, and issuing FTP credentials. That part is now a whole lot cheaper and easier and more secure. It doesn't get much easier than signing up for e.g. Glitch.
      - fartcannon 4y ago

mathieuh 4y ago

When I was in primary school, at around 10- or 11-years-old there was a popular website that gave you a homepage and had challenges for doing things like making the header a certain size or having images and so on, I remember thinking it was really cool I think it was called Grid<something> or <Something>grid, I just had a look but couldn't find it Think it was somehow linked to schools, this was in the UK around 2005

bryanlarsen 4y ago

> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. I can't answer that for a 13 year old, but I can for an 8 year old. Minecraft. The elaborate stuff my daughter built at that age is way more gratifying than anything I could have built as an 8 year old.

Steltek 4y ago
My then-5yo built rollercoasters single handed. I helped embellish it with trigger driven fireworks and other stuff for some combo quality time and screen time. Minecraft is such a perfect game for little kids and it works "offline" pretty well.

mattwad 4y ago

I took a summer class in C++ in middle school and ditched programming for probably 5 years before coming back when i learned I could make games with my TI calculator :)

sirl1on 4y ago

> Not sure if there's still tools out there where a 13 year old kid with no technical experience can immediately get gratification with something so simple on a computer. Lego MindStorms! There's a lab at my local university filled with Lego and basic robot sensors/actuators. Schools and other community clubs can book one-time or regular workshops. What fascinates me the most is the adaptability to the students' abilities. Young students can do "block based programming", telling the robot what to do with very simple command blocks that connect to each other. With rising profession, advanced blocks can be made available that are more powerful, resembling software control structures. New sensors can be used and robots are built by the students themselves instead of prebuilt. At some point, you can ditch the graphical block based programming and show the generated Java code and introduce the students to basic software development.

0_____0 4y ago

My first experience of programming was walking up to an Apple II in grade school (this was in the 2000s, those were some old machines) and punching in code listing from a book. The machines didn't do anything when you powered them on, just waited for you to enter code or commands. It was so simple, and it just begged you to start writing programs. Now people talk about getting their kids started with programming, and end up talking about raspberry pis and Linux distros and whatnot. Granted the tools now are so much more powerful, and a determined kid can write a best selling iPhone app, but there's something wonderful about a machine that shows up to you as a blank slate, awaiting instruction.

shagie 4y ago
> The machines didn't do anything when you powered them on, just waited for you to enter code or commands. I am reminded of the old Kids React videos (which themselves are now nearly a decade old)... Kids React to Technology (an old Apple ][+) https://youtu.be/PF7EpEnglgk https://youtu.be/PF7EpEnglgk
piva00 4y ago
Same way I got interested in programming, except instead of an Apple II (which was prohibitively expensive and rare in Brazil with import substitution in the 90s) I had access to my dad's Gradiente MSX and manuals for BASIC. When you boot up a MSX it was the same: a straight command line waiting for inputs, learning to command that was quite magical for 8 year-old me and my intro to programming in general.
edenlinger 4y ago
Similar story but newer hardware. I was given a machine built with left over parts from the IT company my did did sales for. Booted right to the CLI. I was given a giant red hat manual and told to have fun. It was awesome.

mch82 4y ago

Checkout Firefox Developer Edition, https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/developer/ Create an HTML file and open it up in the browser without a web server (though some advanced stuff will need a web server running). The developer tools built into the browser can be used to interact with the page and see how changing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript affects it. Web console can be used to experiment with JavaScript, https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_console/index.html https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/devtools-user/web_co...

Snowworm 4y ago
It doesn't even need to be developer edition. That is more geared towards extension development rather than web page development.

LecroJS 4y ago

I tutor kids in my free time from ages 4 up to college. I find that Processing/p5.js is a great tool for teaching younger kids how to use their imagination through the vessel of built-in functions + tweaking arguments to instantly see their input on the canvas in the form of bright, flashy colors/shapes. It requires a much more hands on approach and can really only be done well in 1 on 1 settings. While I wish there was a way for me to be less of a navigator in terms of the amount of code that goes on the screen, I have come to find that kids are generally exceptional at pattern recognition. Even my student that is 4 (although he’s a smart kid) is capable of writing his own scripts now without much guidance in his logic/syntax. I had my own start with micro worlds as a kid, and played with netlogo in a college class. That made me a staunch supporter of kids getting into code through agent/turtle based environments

JacobThreeThree 4y ago
I agree, Processing/p5.js is great for beginner programming.

multiplegeorges 4y ago

Glitch (https://glitch.com https://glitch.com) is the closest thing I can think of right now.

rchaud 4y ago

At some point in 2013 I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general. I just wanted to make a website to start off with, just a bunch of linked pages. I already knew a tiny bit of HTML from college, but that was years ago and I wanted to know what had changed. So you can imagine my confusion watching that CS50 lecture as it was seemingly covering everything EXCEPT the stuff non-technical end users are familiar with: websites, apps and games. Yes, yes, I now know that CS isn't about coding but about underlying fundamentals. But that doesn't change the reality that CS50 online has been viewed many, many more times than people who've sat in a CS class, and those people likely had similarly simple goals as I did. Long story short however, I took a video course on webdev and learned far more in terms of immediately applicable skills. Again, I wasn't trying to get hired at FAANG. I just wanted to get to the level of 'webmaster', where I knew just enough to handle markup, hosting, SSL and CRUD functions. Learning by doing has been far more rewarding than following online courses.

extra88 4y ago
> I watched Lecture 1 of Harvard CS50 because everybody said that was the best starting point for people interested in web dev, product development, tech in general. That was not good advice. CS50 is an excellent, introductory, survey CS course but it's still a CS course.
- rchaud 4y ago
  Most advice aimed at absolute beginners is bad, because the questions are bad. E.g. "what's the best programming language?" You and I may know that the question is a bad one, but beginners don't know that. And when they ask, they aren't told to rephrase the question as "What would I like to build?" Someone will just say "well I know Javascript and...." and it goes from there.

salawat 4y ago

Man, I loved the whole process of learning about IRQ's address spaces, I/O, North and South bridge, DMA... I didn't know a lick of programming, but just knowing how to trace the 0's and 1's through the hardware greatly boosted my confidence in interacting with the computer. No matter what program or language got put in front of me, I knew that something on a disk or in memory, or in some storage somewhere was telling the computer to do it. Then I set out to understand the people who wrote those things and what they set out to do. Then I realized I probably hated most of you. Because you went out of the way to make having my computer do what I wanted harder. I'm somewhat reluctant to encourage youngsters down the path. I'm not sure it's the healthiest occupation.