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Ask Slashdot: Do Kids Still Take Interest In Programming For Its Own Sake?
nirgle writes "I have been wondering lately if there are any kids interested in programming for its own sake anymore. When I was my nephew's age, computers were still fascinating: There wasn't a laptop on every table, facebook wasn't splattered on every screen, and you couldn't get any question answered in just a couple seconds with Google. When I was 10, I would have done anything for a close programming mentor instead of the 5-foot high stack of books that I had to read cover-to-cover on my own. So I was happy when my nephew started asking about learning to do what "Uncle Jay does." Does the responsibility now shift to us to kindle early fires in computer science, or is programming now just another profession for the educational system to manage?"
Another reader pointed out a related post on the Invent with Python blog titled "Nobody wants to learn how to program."
Anyone rarely does anything just for its sake. There's always some ultimate goals. As a become adult, programming became means of getting money and helping with business. When I was a kid, programming enabled me to make games and sandboxes that weren't otherwise available. I did some great things too.. but I never wanted to program "just for the sake of it". I wanted the results of that programming. Even if that meant a little fun sandbox game made by me.
It's not just computers, this is true for everything. Everyone does something for a reason. For me, programming was a way to create the games and sandboxes I dreamed of and enjoyed. I never really even finished anything, but I had my mind going around the AI and the general gameplay mechanics. Especially when I was waiting for bus or doing something other boring stuff. But, I was never really fascinated about computers or programming *per se*. I was interested at what those techniques could give me.
So rather than trying to educate programming, computer history or other boring stuff, try to tell what fun stuff you can do, or whatever he would be interested at. Everything else will come later, and the kids will either pick it up themselves or ask, if they want to.
Doing what Uncle Jay does... Yeah - tried that. My parole officer is still upset.... However the Catholic Church has contacted me back on that job offer....
... are a tiny minority. Always have been, always will be. The submitter seems to think the average 10-year-old should be interested in programming because he was at that age. Well, good for him, and I guarantee there are still 10-year-olds interested in it, but they're going to be awfully thin on the ground -- and this was just true back then as it is now.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
The ability - which generally just takes a PC, a book and some time.
The desire. You've got to want to build something. You then get to add stuff to it. You then realize you don't know how to add something (this is where you go to the index of the book you abandoned days before, realize it's not in there, rush online, find the solution, realize you've done something else in a stupid way, decide you might want to fix that etc etc). Basically the hump is getting hello world up on the screen and then creating the very first bit of your 'thing'
I don't even think it has to be programming per se. Quite fun playing with APIs on sites that you're familiar with, with something friendly like PHP.
I wanted to look up the prices of my old DVDs I wanted to sell. Pain in the arse on Amazon... oh, hold on they have an API.
Oh, then how about using a CSV to load and dump results to?
Shit, I seem to be getting results back from the wrong bits of amazon, lets add some array sorting.
Would be nice to store lookups I've made - MySQL
Oooh, how about other sites... they don't have an API *googles*... "Oooh Curl" etc.
Basically, if you're interested in something and have time, it will all follow. You can later learn how to do it properly later, but it tends to flow. Nobody wants to sit down and read a chapter on exception handling - but once your program is mysteriously failing, you suddenly find you've become quite fascinated with the intricacies of exceptions. You'll just bolt them on until the problem is fixed, but on your next project you'll have that pain in your mind from the start, and may find yourself now dutifully adding them.
I'm meandering all over the place here now - I think you just need to ask your nephew what he wants to build, make sure it's realistic (or choose a functional subsection to start with). Also nice if it's something that could go online, be run on a smartphone or similar - once you've built this thing, you want to show it off.
Programming is a fundamental skill, almost like reading and writing. Children learn the shape of the characters in one year, but they keep learning how to read and write for many more years, because reading and writing aren't mechanical skills. Programming is a formalization of a solution, and this skill is fundamental. The most important aspect of programming is understanding the problem in detail, and that's something everybody could use. It's like writing up a complicated story without loose ends and contradictions: We're not all going to write books and screenplays, but almost everybody needs to express more complicated thoughts than "I want a cheeseburger".
My cousin and I both started programming when we were ten, back in the golden days of the Apple II and the TI-99/4a (for us). We got into it for different reasons. He delighted in creating varied and colorful system crashes. This behavior turned out to be indicative of a larger mental health issue. I did it because I appreciated the beauty and purity of logic. Eventually I ended up concentrating heavily on computers to the partial exclusion of natural human companionship. This too indicated issues of a different nature. Nevertheless, my hobby matured into a lucrative career. My cousin never matured. You have been warned.
I can't use my mod points when I've posted in the thread.
Mod +1 Informative...
No. That is like asking if there are kids who want to weld for welding sake. Or fuck for fuck sake. We don't fuck for fuck sake, we fuck for the climax. Without the climax, fucking would be fucking boring.
Most people code because they want to get something done. Those who don't work in government. Kids want to code a game, the kids that want to code a database or search algorithm tend to be watched by the FBI, from a safe distance, through a snipers scope.
It is the same as with a spoken language. Nobody wants to learn French for the sake of the language, they want to impress chicks. Japanese is only studied by people with a fantasy of picking up school girls, desu. Latin for those who wished to be picked up by Catholic priests.
The easiest way to keep kids interested is to make sure things beep and whistle and spin. It does't matter that much if it is text graphics, direct 3d or leds on a Arduino board, or a programming robot game. What matters is that the concepts have clear examples with easy to understand results.
It is the reason PHP is so popular, its examples are extremely clear and light on the jargon. It is the reason Lego is such a success, nobody has to spend time learning the building blocks of Lego, they are clear... then you can spend all your energy on creating.
Kids haven't really changed but nerdy pursuits have always been the domain of the select few... the few selected by girls not to be dated.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
After 30 years of professional development, I feel that many developers SUCK! They wear some "architect" or "senior developer" badge but struggle through the most basic concepts. I believe the reason is that MANY coders are simply chasing paychecks or have been pushed into the field. They lack the PASSION that I remember when I first got into it. Everyone was learning to program because they loved these cook PC things and WANTED to do something with them AFTER they soldered everything together. Most "geeks" share that same type of passion. They gravitate to the next cool innovation and, in the process, become great at what they love. However, today, the industry is flooded with bodies that are simply working the cliche' 9-5 and drooling over a six-figure paycheck.
True.
And the submitter should beware not to drown any spark the nephew thinks he may have. Therefore, it is very important to try to understand where the kid is coming from and where he wants to go.
Maybe programming can be it, but it might be some other, more general interest in computers, if the kid isn't quote clear on what programming is.
Explore with your nephw. If it turns out programming was not exactly what the kid will find interesting, at least you might be able to teach him to be a power user. Or if the nephew decides on pretty much any other interest, you could probably still help him get the most out of a computer to pursue whatever it is he might find a passion for.
Nowadays a computer (and perhaps even some custom app you design together) could be useful even if the kid wants to be a ballet-anthropologist, drag queen or beekeper or whatever.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
When I was an 80s teen with my ZX Spectrum, I could write games that weren't too far behind the earliest commercial games. (back then it was even a novelty to have control over what appeared on your old telly screen!)
I wrote games that gave me as much fun as the coin-op machines back then, when things were primitive.
Now though, how can any kid write a fluid 3D FPS shoot-up? I take my hat off to any who can! Where's the incentive? Where's the novelty?
Little 2D games on the kids' Android phones, maybe. Perhaps.
We had a 14 year old work experience lad, who was the nephew of one of the owners of the business, and he wanted to become an app developer - when we chatted about this further, it turned out that his claimed "programming experience" amounted to using the drag-and-drop style of online website wizards, and using apps from the iTunes store.
He had a goal in mind, and he was raring to go, so we decided to embrace this enthusiasm and run with it - so we decided that the best thing for him to do during the two weeks with us was to design and build a basic app - he was thrilled by this. We gave him a task for two hours on the first morning, which was to research the apps out there and decide what was best to build (building a copy of something out there is easier for this sort of thing than coming up with the concept itself).
He came back with "I want to build World of Warcraft". Crap.
We eventually scaled him back to building a HTML5 version of tic-tac-toe, as the logic is simple, the graphics are simple, and the HTML experience travels well. He was given a lot of personal tutorials from myself and the other developers for the first two days, basically a beginners guide to HTML, and then told to see if he could come up with a basic page with a table in which would hold the game board - no styling, no JavaScript, just a basic page with a table.
Despite help from us developers being on tap (we encouraged questions, we discouraged "do it for me" - examples are fine so long as work and understanding was needed to translate the code into what he was doing, so a simple copy and paste wouldn't solve the set issue), by the end of the first day he hadn't grasped the concept of nested elements to build the table. What he came up with even IE barfed over.
The poor kid had no grasp for it at all. I hope it was a failure on our part rather than inability, but really it was inability. He never realised software development was so difficult, no realisation as to what was actually involved in the process or the building itself. He saw pretty things and thought they were simple to produce.
So, anyone who gets the chance to introduce a child to software development, please take it nice and slow and be prepared for lots of failures, lots of frustration and lots of patience.
By the end of the two weeks he was proclaiming he wanted to be a farmer. And now, I hear, he wants to hire out construction equipment (after he was given a day of work experience on a farm).
Rather than doing the classic "hello world" in BASIC, kids today start out by e.g. modding games.
Personally, I remember having fun by developing platformers using GameMaker back when it was free. This sort of graphical programming got me used to thinking in terms of loops, conditionals and variables -- as well as offering a high-level scripting language that let you access extra features.
When I were a lad, working down the coal mines in the snow 30 hours a day, I learned programming in order to achieve a goal - make computers do fun stuff.
If you want to get a kid interested in programming, give them a simple game compiled from source, ask them what they'd like to change, and let the voyage of discovery begin.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My experience is that the kids don't want to do the same kind of programming we did in the 80's and early 90's. At that time it was mind-blowing for me to just have the computer do a simple animation of a couple of lines on the screen. No kid is interested in that anymore.
Later in the late 90's and early 2000's it was all about the internet. Kids wanted to write html and then later PHP etc. They still do it to an extent now but more often then not kids now-days just want to set up and customize packages and templates with very little programming effort (like Drupal).
There is one thing though that kids like to do in the 80's that has survived and flourished to this day - hardware/robotics. Kids love to play around with Arduino, especially with sensors, actuators, LED matrices etc. With all the content available on the internet, including how-to videos this is easier than ever and I think more people do these kind of things than before.
I started programming when I was about 10 years old for one very simple reason. I enjoy making things.
I recently built my own house for that same reason. I also made most of the furniture in it as well.
If, at the end of the day, I can say "I made that", then I am happy.
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
Well, when I started on my Commodore 64 you started at the command prompt read to write code, so yeah I'd say it takes at least a little more prodding than before to get into programming. Also you started with just two lines:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Okay, so it doesn't produce a very impressive result but as "bang for the buck" it's pretty good. If the reaction is "All that to produce so little?!" you've lost. Hell, you might have lost anyway if they point you to a $100 million AAA game and say that is cool, I want to make something like that. But since you can't ask for time to be turned back to simple sprite based graphics you can't change that, but at least not start them off down the long road.
Personally today I think I'd actually start them off with a game toolkit where you can script events, like Neverwinter Nights or something like that. First of all because it's a game and looks good and produces something cool, second of all because you can start with a level that already exists. Have them modify it and they'll start thinking about objects, attributes, state, conditions, boolean logic (assuming you want to start them down the OOP path) without banging their head on the really hard issues. Plus you get to make your own adventure, which is creative and fun while learning.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
A lot changed since the 1970s. In the 1970s computer were science fiction and science fiction was en vogue. We tried to build our own computers based on transistors and later on microchips. In the 1980s things already improved so much, that a lot of people could by a home computer like ZX spectrum, Commodore C64 or Amstrad CPC 464. These machines provided a simple BASIC interface. They were designed for start and play. Where play meant programming. And you could dig into those machines and learn to peek and poke around in the hardware. Then you learned assembler etc. In the 1990s this moved to PCs. While old PCs still allowed you to access the hardware and you had to work with the console. Upcoming GUIs made the direct experience of the machine much more complicated. You couldn't re-program Pong in a week, while learning BASIC.
So on one side, computers get more complex and shield people from the machine and the machine feeling, and on the other side the sci-fi feeling is no longer so intriguing today than in those days. While in the 1970s, if you understood computers you could build your own moon lander software. At least a facsimile. And a lot of the people did. And the program would only display longitude, latitude and height above ground, as well as, speed and fuel. But all without graphic (which had to be imagined). Today moon landing is lame. Especially compared to those days. the whole society is no longer in technology.
In short: The whole setting is different. And the nerds of today go into gaming and become dorks.
This entire submission misunderstands the real draw of programming. The desire to learn programming is out of an intrinsic desire in some people to create or build artifacts from resources we have obtained. Some of us are builder/creator archetypes and we are drawn to the process of creation.
If the argument held up, then the quality of carpentry would have degraded considerably with the advent of power tools. Nobody needs to hand-spin a spade to drill a large hole anymore, and while I am handy with a chisel, I can still do things faster and with better quality by using a router for certain situations. The power-tools have allowed us to put arguably better quality wood products in a MUCH faster timeframe, and all with the same sense of satisfaction that you get from a beautiful new table, cabinet or chair.
I do think however that in todays age it is a lot harder to stay focused amidst constant distractions, and it is a lot easier to find information than ever before, making us all slightly lazy from time to time. We are more prone to get frustrated and do something else, so the extreme convenience doesn't come without its faults for sure.
Assembly might actually teach them something useful, while BASIC and COBOL serve to do as much damage to their understanding or real programming as possible.
Please don't get into this purist crap.
You really expect a ten-year-old to dive right into Smalltalk or LISP so they will have as pure an understanding of coding as possible?
BASIC and COBOL both had their place and their time, and they did their jobs well. If BASIC hadn't been around I doubt the GenX coders would have got into it so young or so keenly, since most of our generation learned how to code on home computers in BASIC (and then migrated to Assembler when BASIC wasn't quick enough). There's a reason that there's still millions of lines of mission-critical COBOL code quietly running our infrastructure too.
If I had to pick a language to teach someone new in now, it'd be a hard call. I'd love to say C++ and get them into game coding but the amount of work to get from a standing start to something that runs and you can go 'I made that' at is pretty huge, and C++ doesn't cope with newbie errors very well.
Java and C# would be OK, but massive...there's a *lot* of ground to cover in each of them, and while you could start small it'd be hard to stop them zooming off into irrelevant tangents and exploring half-dead libraries.
Python's good, and pretty well-structured and easy to follow, I'd probably go with that as a modern-day BASIC. So (and I know I'm feeding the troll here) would Python do any 'damage to their understanding of real programming'?
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Absolutely they do.
My son is in year 8 at Melrose high in Canberra Australia. They are doing two courses specific to this: games programming and general programming. 3d modeling is also a choice. He is doing all of them (chip off the old block!)
Their assignment, for 14 year olds is quite hard. It raised my eyebrows when I read it. I'm a multi time CTO with a deep history is c, c++, java, ror, PHP and perl. They were asked as a 15% assignment over two weeks to write a number of very complex programs displaying skill in some quite complex areas in JavaScript, vb, actionscript and powershell. This is quite an amazing thing! These little fellas are in year 8!
The class is voluntary, but wow, is is hard. The kids absolutely love it. They apparently are hyper involved and super enthusiastic. While the teacher may be a messiah (I don't know her) but its obvious the kids are revved up beyond control.
Just bought a new quantum computer, but I'm uncertain how it works.
They're ORs, not XORs!
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I can't say why kids aren't learning this stuff anymore, but they're not.
My girlfriend's sons are at the ages when they're looking for their first jobs -- they're 14, 16, and 18. I asked her what programming languages they know, and she said none. They've never programmed, at all. Not even a high school course in it.
By the time I was 14 I knew Atari BASIC, LOGO, and a little Pascal. I had already authored games and applications on my Atari 400. By the time I was 18 I was designing a relational database in FORTRAN using edlin for my father's insurance business. (I told my girlfriend this and she said -- and I quote -- "But you're a genius, hon." That's why I love her. :) But her kids are just as bright as I am, IMHO.)
On the other hand, kids today know applications. All of her kids have experience with Word, Excel, and Photoshop. Maybe that's all they need.
The signs are that programming expertise is going to become a far rarer skill in the next generation, but general computer literacy will be widespread. I think maybe that's a step forward. But I worry that it's not a good pool of talent to help us take another step forward in the generation after theirs.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
It's funny you should mention boredom and building blocks.
When I was a kid, LEGO was all the rage in the UK (and probably many other places too). They were just simple building blocks. They had all the simplicity of wooden blocks, but the advantage that if a clutzy kid like me jogged the surface they were on they didn't all fall down. As they go more complex, they started including manuals to show you how to build different things with the pieces they'd included. (Mechano did the same thing)
Then I noticed a shift in philosophy and the manual had fewer and fewer designs - until they only had one design in the manual. This may have changed since, but I'd be surprised. Since my son was born, I've noticed how toys these days seem to be single serving. They only have one prescribed function. I'm sure that's not how it used to be when I was 5! I've also noticed how my soon to be 1 year old son is more interested in the boxes toys come in, than the toys themselves.
I still remember my Mum coming back from a night class where someone had demonstrated how to program the BBC Acorn Electron in BASIC (at the time a new machine - there I go showing my age!) to work out the average of two numbers, and she complained that it took longer to program the computer than to do the maths on a piece of paper. She clearly didn't understand the power this machine *could* have. My Dad on the other hand did. Not for working out the averages of numbers, but to do other things.
My question for the audience is this; Are kids these days bored because they only have single use toys? The toys they have only do one thing. This leads back to the original article, because when I learnt to program (on that Acorn Electron no less), I learnt because I was fascinated by how I could get the computer to do stuff, other then the prescribed functions that came with the machine.
Now, I'm probably being hypocritical(or something) for saying this, because...while i grew up with PC's in the early ninties (my father co-founded the first computing store in the city), I never did do anything productive with it.
I managed to navigate dos and get into A-colon.
And start up windows to play SKIFREE!
Now, back then I'm unsure on how i could ever get into trying to play around with the computer creatively.(to dumb to know what Qbasic was or to even find it)
I see the value and richness of the early day computers, but its not from personal experience.
So my idea is...kids, aren't bored, they have games and content delivered to them, they have so much easy access to simulations then they know what to do with it.
And the hows are buried beneath accessibility paradigms.
But back then, a kid with a trash80, C64 and all the rest, had what was bough in stores or what they got ahold of in BBS'es or copy parties.
That, with the C64 BASIC OS, which shoved the programming environment in your face, really was the BEST circumstances to stimulate a kids curiosity.
The PC's of yore had its programming ability advertised, today they are basically appliances.
And for me who couldn't even get into Qbasic, WASN'T even familiar with the concept of programming, Imagine how it is today.
You need to actively seek out a compiler and possibly an IDE.
That little bar to even run a simple build can block someone before they discover the joy of making a loop that iterates the sid-chip
My -1 Troll is actually a +1 funny. And my -1 flame is actually a +1 insightfull.
I'm 19 years old, and although I've only been coding for 2-3 years, I love it immensely. I've always loved computers, but never really took the time to get to know the computer. My junior year of high-school, I took an intro to programming course, just to see what it was like. My parents are computer-illiterate,and I didn't haveany real tech-mentors. Nonetheless, I excelled in the course, discovered my passion, and have been attacking a programming career ever since. I can't explain it, but I love code. I might be an exception rather than the rule, but there's still people out there.