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> One thing that led me to start creating Pickcode was the number of bugs I encountered in existing tools for coding education. Fifteen minutes of lost time to

> One thing that led me to start creating Pickcode was the number of bugs I encountered in existing tools for coding education. Fifteen minutes of lost time to a minor bug or incorrect instruction step doesn’t seem like a big issue, but when those fifteen minutes represent some of the first minutes a student is programming, they have an outsized impact in changing the student’s attitude toward the subject. As a young CS student who had self-taught before taking a formal curriculum, this was one of the things I found the most disgusting about the state of high-schools CS ed. When the exercises and grading code have bugs, that's a major problem. When the instructor can't recognize those bugs when you point them out, that's even worse. I moved on to tutoring and teaching CS later in life, (on the side, as a mentor with a FIRST Robotics program,) and encountering bugs in the curriculum like these were some of the things that set my students back the most.

malfist 3y ago
When I was getting my BS in CS, that drove me the most nuts when the professor just didn't understand the coding language they were teaching. In my assembly class I still remember asking the professor for help with a code challenge, and he comes over and looks at what I've got done and starts asking me what a snippet of code was doing when it was a snippet of code he provided us with. That didn't work. And to top it all off, the assembly we were learning was heavily dependent on a custom library provided by a CD from the book publisher that included no documentation and couldn't be applied outside of class.
- rgblambda 3y ago
  >that drove me the most nuts when the professor just didn't understand the coding language they were teaching. A lot of people will have the same experience. It all clicked when I learned that often the lessons were written by consultants or by their predecessor, and the professor is just faking it until they can get back to their research.

malfist 3y ago

When I was getting my BS in CS, that drove me the most nuts when the professor just didn't understand the coding language they were teaching. In my assembly class I still remember asking the professor for help with a code challenge, and he comes over and looks at what I've got done and starts asking me what a snippet of code was doing when it was a snippet of code he provided us with. That didn't work. And to top it all off, the assembly we were learning was heavily dependent on a custom library provided by a CD from the book publisher that included no documentation and couldn't be applied outside of class.

rgblambda 3y ago
>that drove me the most nuts when the professor just didn't understand the coding language they were teaching. A lot of people will have the same experience. It all clicked when I learned that often the lessons were written by consultants or by their predecessor, and the professor is just faking it until they can get back to their research.