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A similar idea worked with my son (who is still in primary school). He found it very difficult to grasp the idea of Git in general and making small PRs like thi
by james-redwood 4y ago
A similar idea worked with my son (who is still in primary school). He found it very difficult to grasp the idea of Git in general and making small PRs like this helped him to warm up to the whole thing over a few days. Every beginner has to start somewhere I suppose.
- ushakov 4y agowhat? am i the only one who thinks primary school children shouldn’t be learning git? edit: thanks for downvoting me and sorry for questioning your parenting principles
- cyanf 4y agoWhy not?
- ushakov 4y agobecause you can’t get your childhood back but you can always learn these things as adult
- namanaggarwal 4y agoI think your premise that coding is bad for kids is incorrect. Coding is not typing. It's an art of solving problems. My childhood was coding, it was(is?) something I was good at and I thoroughly enjoyed doing. My initial days were just writing random macros on Excel or coding out my maths problems on BASIC. That has what shaped my career
- ushakov 4y agoi didn’t say coding was bad for kids i myself started at 12 (actually with BASIC!) and while there’s no denial that it has helped my career at later point in life, it has completely alienated me from the rest of people my schoolmates still introduce me as “nerd” to other people (not in front of me of course) not that i care that much, but it still hurts
- samus 4y agoSo, if you discovered your (hypothetical or not) kid being interested in solving puzzles and programming, would you stop them? Instead of encouraging them to find some offline hobbies and spending time with other people to balance it out? Also, people can be a**holes to others for any and no reason. Being different is just the most common and a seemingly rational one. It's an important life lesson to learn that it's often not possible to change people, and frequently not even worth trying. Adapting to them to fit their small worldview is even less promising.
- anthomtb 4y agoI too learned BASIC when I was 12 and often felt alienated from my peers. Turns out the alienation was from being a know-it-all, argumentative asshole and had very little to do with my programming skills. Most of my classmates probably would have found the programming somewhat interesting had I not lofted it over their heads as a badge of self superiority.
- ushakov 4y agoi wasn't the kind of a person you're describing it just so happened that my knowledge helped me perform better at IT class than anybody else, so they got pissed at me for being able to comprehend something they themselves don't
- anthomtb 4y agoThis makes one wonder what era and culture in which you grew up. You really got bullied just for being the most knowledgeable one in class? If so that’s awful and I’m sorry for what you had to go through.
- lolinder 4y agoFor what it's worth, it sounds like you had a childhood that was very different than what kids today are growing up with, at least in my area. By around 2014 the cool kids in my local high school were the nerds, and it's pretty much stayed that way. I worked with a neighborhood youth group where the kid who was at the center of everything was super into fortnite and coding. When he introduced himself to me the first thing he said was "I'm pretty much a nerd"—and he said it with pride! A few of the other kids felt the need to establish their nerd cred, too. This was in a neighborhood in the poorest part of a nearly-rural town. Their parents were mostly in trades, not tech. "Nerd" has become a badge of honor that is sought after and claimed by kids, not a derogatory label assigned by others.
- rdsubhas 4y agoYou are jumping to a conclusion that — just because the parent taught something about "git", they didn't get to do anything else. Where did you get that idea from? Nowhere did the parent say that this is the only thing their kid does. They may very well engage in a hundred more childhood activities in addition to this. Edit: numbers
- ushakov 4y agoi didn’t even imply this i only questioned the usefulness of teaching 5-12 year olds a concept no 5-12 year old needs unless they want to enter workforce at 13 (god save them from this)!
- rhn_mk1 4y ago> a concept no 5-12 year old needs That's a huge assumption here. At the base of what a human needs are the physiological needs. Do humans need art? Fun? Maths? Git? Where do you draw the line?
- ushakov 4y agoi draw the line when parents train children skills, which are only useful in context of performing work
- rhn_mk1 4y agoThen a lot of people don't need to learn maths beyond addition and multiplication. I prefer the opposite interpretation though: anything can become a hobby or puzzle. That puts nearly everything on the "ok" side of your line.
- viraptor 4y agoThat's not the only context. I would likely appreciate git at 12yo. I definitely enjoyed programming already and I believe that was the time I learned more about maths to code some music visualiser plugins and was sending fun examples back and forth with a friend. Git would've been useful.
- claviska 4y agoSome of the best experiences of my childhood were learning how to code, which ultimately turned into a career that has opened up more opportunities and experiences than I would have known otherwise.
- marian_ivanco 4y agoyes
- dunefox 4y agoYou are absolutely correct. We have a 3 dimensional learning environment outside that's objectively better for learning and playing than anything else.
- mihaic 4y agoCompletely agree with you, although it's hard to explain why. Teaching children specifics without fundamentals prepares them for the job market, not for life.
- ushakov 4y agothanks for the support! sadly, some folks disagree these skills have enabled them to live a great life and they want the same for their children i certainly can understand that, but i disagree with the approach
- mihaic 4y agoYeah, the better I've become as a software developer, the more unnatural and almost dehumanizing do I realize the whole developer lifecycle is.
- tbrownaw 4y agoThe job market is a somewhat important part of life. Even if you prefer to hate work and coworkers on principle, it still helps pay for other things. Specifics are a useful starting point for getting to fundamentals; trying to learn abstracted stuff without having anything to tie it too tends to be a bit tricky. Even for adults, which is why "here's a novel to help illustrate what we mean by these things" is a thing (for example, The Phoenix Project). It's also why math tends to start with arithmetic and memorizing times tables, and only after that gets to more fundamental stuff like algebra and then calculus.
- robonerd 4y agoIt seems like premature vocational education. Vocational education is usually started as secondary or post-secondary education, not primary. Starting vocational education so young feels like a slide back in time to the 19th century, except even then, apprenticeship usually began around 12-15 years old.
- dEnigma 4y agoIf they're forcing their child to learn git I'd agree. If the child somehow got into contact with git (e.g. by getting into programming) and wanted to learn more about it, I don't see the harm.