Learning: Mush together some related concepts

[badlydrawnrob]

Programming should be fun

Problem set:

1. If a kid can't understand it, it's too fucking complex.¹
2. I'm rubbish at maths. WSIGAF about this function?
3. Programming is boring, takes ages to learn, and too much code!
4. Why is this useful to me (at this point in time)?
5. I feel on my own; I don't have a mentor to guide me.²

Learning how to think, regardless of the vehicle³

A general problem solver

Consider your student Mark. What are the problems?

1. Rushing ahead
2. Not really understanding the problem, or syntax
3. Not having the breadth of knowledge necessary
4. Can I think through a problem?⁴

Pitching the problem

Can you create a problem solver for these ages?

Footnotes

1. This might be wishful thinking for more complex computer science, definitely for SICP and more complicated concepts (wtf are opaque types?). The general ideas of computer science, model->view->update should have simple examples in the concrete->pictorial->abstract approach. ↩

2. This is a particularly difficult problem, when you get stuck and you don't know where to turn. There's probably sites that help out in this regard (Exercism it has some form of personal mentoring) but for the most part, StackOverflow or for Elm-specific, there's some community resources still like Discourse ↩

3. It doesn't necessarily have to be programming, or a difficult problem, but being able to whiteboard out an idea is a very useful skill (even if you can't solve the problem). "Design thinking" and "how to solve it" are good examples. ↩

4. Even if Mark doesn't know the syntax (with a similar ethos as (3)) he could still think around the problem and sketch it out. Remember the egg drop test, where we created our own damage chart. Given some materials (like functions/syntax and basic knowledge of physics) how do we test out which wrapping method (composition) might help us solve the problem? (Protect our egg!) ↩