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Do kids really respond to this material? Does it stoke their desire to learn? I feel like these videos take "adult programmer pedagogy" and wrap it in kid-frien
by bitwize 3y ago
Do kids really respond to this material? Does it stoke their desire to learn? I feel like these videos take "adult programmer pedagogy" and wrap it in kid-friendly language. Kids don't care about grown-up rationales for programming language features.
Years back, I walked my nephew through a basic programming exercise. I asked him what he would like to see the computer draw. Because he liked trains and Minecraft, he said "a square train". So we booted up Python and used its turtle graphics module to draw a square engine with rectangular smokestacks, a right-angles-only cowcatcher, and square wheels.
Once we had drawn our first wheel, I showed him how to take that code and break it out into a function ("we call this refactoring!"), and how to abstract the x and y coordinates into parameters to the function, so square wheels can be drawn anywhere. Then I showed him how to define a "boxcar" function in terms of the wheel function, so boxcars with square wheels can be added to the train.
I don't know how much of it stuck, but I suspect some of it did because he's 12 now and wants to program space robots.
So we had a goal the kid wanted (a square train), and we worked to the goal, discovering problems along the way, and introducing tools programmers use to solve those problems (like functions and refactoring). OOP can be introduced similarly, with an environment that features multiple turtles, game sprites, or something, and the programmer must instruct a particular object to perform an action.
From what Don Hopkins says about the Kodable software itself, it does support some of these ideas which is cool. So maybe the videos work better as something supplementary to the app.
- DonHopkins 3y agoYes, it comes with several different kinds of "microworlds" that are games in themselves, but with "levels" you can build, i.e. with tiles or objects, so many different (even user defined) scenarios are possible. Then it has lessons with gradually increasing complexity that you have to solve. It's really a lot like Robot Odyssey (yet not as hard and limited), but you're learning a real programming language, byte by byte. Starting with drag-and-drops icons and boxes to represent sequences, then conditionals and branching and looping and functions. The Hardest Video Game You've Never Played | Robot Odyssey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iycj199McEg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iycj199McEg Before "What is a Function?" you have to learn "What is Sequence?" and "What are Conditions?": What is Sequence? | Coding for Kids | Kodable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Pc3UnePZY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Pc3UnePZY What are Conditions? | Coding for Kids | Kodable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJYIRcsdHWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJYIRcsdHWg Each of these lessons has corresponding levels that have different simplified visual approaches to programming. The object oriented stuff comes later, and has some corresponding object oriented simulation game microworlds, like tower defense, virtual pets, and programmable drones, etc. I wish there was a video showing the virtual pets and Factorio/Robot-Odyssey-esque robot drones you can program to take care of them -- that was really neat, and taught event based programming.