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We should rethink how we teach people to code (deadsimpletech.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

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Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

The English national curriculum exposes every child to programming of some sort. 10 years ago it was 8yo kids learning Scratch, all of them.

I posted about it at the time: it turns out scratch is probably the answer, scratch is probably still the answer

in high school maths and computers they learn python.

my kid has no wish to become a professional dev, but can wield python as is useful to them.

[–] zogwarg@awful.systems 2 points 3 weeks ago

When I was a kid in France it was Basic on TI and Casio graphing calculators, while in principle I agree that not every child will enjoy math, the sieve of Eratosthenes, LCM and GCD are good exercises for a first program. And i think it's easy to grasp that it's a lot less tedious to write a program for it, than to do it by hand.

[–] lproven@awful.systems 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I hadn't seen this post of yours before. I like it. I like it a lot.

My $SPROG can't really read very well yet but she can open a saved program in Scratch and run it and show off the results, in SUGAR. I was so proud.

[–] dgerard@awful.systems 2 points 3 weeks ago

IoM cribs from the ENC, here's to them cribbing that bit! See if you can get in there ...