Slashdot Mirror
Teaching Programming Now Emphasizes Sharing
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times explores some of the best ways to teach kids and finds that some of the new tools are encouraging the kids to share their work with each other. One teacher first tried to keep the kids quiet and staring at their own monitors but found it was better to let them copy each other. He calls MIT's Scratch a 'gateway' tool. Then the article points out that programming Blender with Python is not as hard to pick up as your grandparent's programming languages — and kids today are learning them in a few months." The Wikipedia entry on Scratch is worth reading, too.
If that's the goal, then I don't know why the teacher doesn't give them a generic set of code to build off of (written by a make-believe programmer whom they "work with" or that existed in a book) - and each student still works entirely independently of each other.
Because then students wouldn't be able to ask each other "hey, how did you do this?" or "hey, wouldn't this be a better way to do that?" Collaboration improves learning.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But to learn what? I was in the very top percentile of my class at every school I went to. Unfortunately for me, very few of the teachers could teach me anything that I did not find remedial. In the 7th grade I had a math teacher give me the greatest insight I have ever had the pleasure of realizing. She said, I would never learn anything from the teachers or textbooks in school that I couldn't easily figure out on my own. She encouraged me to help others and learn new and interesting things from those around me by observation.
This opened up a whole new world for me. Yes, I tutored many people for a heft sum (enough to comfortable pay for college without incurring any debt). But I also helped those who couldn't afford my services, I made friends, I learned as I taught, I gained valuable social and managerial skills, and most of all I got a great experience out of school even though I hated just about every textbook I ever picked up and most of the lectures where teachers attempted to prepare me for "life" (which I guess is a code word for some standardized test that helps them get funding for the school).
For me I think collaboration is the way to go. Ultimately, in good companies, that is how things work. I have my strengths and the 6 people on my team sitting around me right now have their strengths. We complement one another and we work well. Personally, I am glad I learned that while I was in school, and have mostly forgotten about all the lectures that bored me so badly.