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Coderdojo Inspires Coding In Kids As Young As Seven
An anonymous reader writes "With kids growing up in an increasingly digital world, it's alarming that many of them have no idea how the devices that power their lives actually work. So three cheers for Coderdojo — a worldwide group of volunteers teaching programming and web design to children aged seven and up. From the article: 'Coderdojo's format is open and inclusive. Participants can use the operating system and programming tools of their choice. There is no set curriculum and the only rule is: "Above all: be cool." More rigid approaches, he suggests, can often stifle learners' enthusiasm: "A lot of coding tuition aimed at young people tends to revolve around games," he said. "But that can disengage some young people. Many of them, particularly girls, just aren't interested in gaming. "On the other hand, doing something like developing a web site shows them that they can do things they might not have realized they were able to and combines artistic and design skills with an understanding of why things are built in a certain way."'"
Anyone wanting to start teaching kids how to program can start with a nice free and open project I am involved in called:
http://turtleacademy.com
So if anyone want a simple way to start his kids on programming, just visit this site
Ofer
20 Goto 10
*Sob* Precious memories I hope all kids will have....
Was to participate in program reviews in high schools all over the State of Rhode Island. I recall one classroom where they were learning the Office suite. On the particular day we were there the teacher had them doing a payroll spreadsheet, but they had to look up the tax rates on a cheat sheet.
I talked with the teacher and asked if they had any intention of teaching the kids about VBA and explained what VBA was and how it is present in every Microsoft Office application and lets you do fun things like for instance, calculate the tax, etc. The teacher looked at me with a straight face and said "Well, you need advanced math to program a computer!". I thanked her for her time.
On my review I made note of the conversation and how at the most, one might need maybe one semester of Algebra 1 but if they understood basic mathematical equations they could program.
What I heard is that my comment struck a warning bell in the school. They'd never had someone with an I.T. background review a program before. So it just flew under the radar until I made mention in the official report.
IMO games are the key. I know I learned most of what I know because of games.
Either trying to hack online games or dicking around with configs and custom content on PC games, I was learning. Trying to write macros to automate mundane gaming tasks. I was learning.
Also, I know every programmer out there will want to bash my face in for this, but excel is also very good to learn from. And a lot of games stand to gain from doing a bit of heavy analysis, or at least tracking, in excel. You learn how to deal with IF and ELSE statements, arrays, tables, lookup, AND/OR logic, strings concatenation and variables. And the framework for doing so in excel is not nearly as intimidating. Most non-programmers can make handy things in excel, that if you broke all the cell into variables and functions into code, would look a whole like a real program, they just don't know it.
At some point during all of this I got curious about "Real" programming and kept looking at C. And while I never fully learned C to a usable level I learned about pointers and memory allocation/addresses/pointers/cleanup/etc. At some point I wanted to get into linux since it seemed more programming friendly. I choose gentoo by pure coincidence, and from bootstrap+compile kernal I learned even more.
All because of games. But the problem becomes that over time it has become harder and harder to hack games; both web and PC based. So many measures in place to stop people from doing it, and even threats of bans. I feel like this is bad for our future. Like the one thing games stood to give to society is diminished by pettiness.
Because we had no choice, there were no pre-built executable back then.
Not to take anything away from the efforts of the volunteers, but I think the project's misnamed. According to Wiki a dojo is broadly "a formal training place for any of the Japanese do arts" or specifically " a formal gathering place for students of any Japanese martial arts style such as karate, judo."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dojo
The key word is "formal", which while not contradicting appears to contrast with the project's goal of fostering "open and inclusive" participation. The presence of older mentors appears to be the main inspiration for the use of the word "dojo" besides its exotica when compared with more conventional terms like "club", "gym" or everybody's summer favorite "camp".
I learned LOGO on an old mac (with floppy floppy disks). When I got my first PC I learned BASIC/BASIC. It was cool, but I also had a great teacher in high school that convinced the school to buy NXT sets, and I got to see some of my classmates see the same "look what I can make a computer do" awesomeness that I did. Today, as I recently made my first android app I still feel the same way. Programming is awesome, whether for fun or work there's just something fun about taking this complicated piece of silicon and making it your bitch.
Like my subject says after reading this
"A lot of coding tuition aimed at young people tends to revolve around games," he said. "But that can disengage some young people. Many of them, particularly girls, just aren't interested in gaming."
Girl's not interested in gaming? Ok then try telling that to all the young and old women gamer's I've met in person and talked to on Ventrillo over the year's playing games such as World of Warcraft, Team Fortress Classic, and Counter-Strike 1.6 (and earlier) and Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2.
Especially World of Warcraft where it seem's more often then not the traditional female roles come into play. You more often see females for example playing healing classes or dps classes before tank classes especially more often then not with bf/gf or husband/wife couples where the man is a tank and the woman is playing the healing role.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
Do we need more programmers? I hear about stories like this all the time, but the company I work for literally gets tons of applicants monthly. None of my coworkes nor myself needed to be "inspired" by a group like this. We were all inspired by just living in tech daily as kids -- which includes games. And if you have a passion, you'll pursue it.
Shouldn't there be a focus on the careers that we have a shortage of? Such as nurses, labor workers, etc.? Or is there a shortage of coders in Scotland?
If the kids truly are interested, then I suppose this is good. However, they should be focusing on good programming practices. Is making websites (probably just HTML and CSS without any PHP, etc.) conducive to this? Hopefully, they are teaching the fundamentals correctly.
The G
was a Kinsale Coderdojo session in the Lilly factory canteen. Here's a video we shot of the event http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMODHilE4qk
I've always wondered how I'd have to do it today. Something like HTML? PHP? Java? Something like Alice or NTX? I've also wondered how I'd best go about it with my own kids.
This article and organization seems to take on the challenge of teaching "7 years olds". The web site even has links on "opening your own dojo", and makes references to different skill levels and languages.
It didn't say anything about curriculum though. It's a great idea - and I'd like to do it, but how? Does it really define that? It's a great idea to teach kinder-gardeners calculus, but you'd have to provide some more specifics on how you intend on doing this for it to make sense to me...
"Coderdojo", must be an alias of the Super Adventure Club.
IMO games are the key. I know I learned most of what I know because of games.
I disagree, but that's not to say I agree with the philosophy of the Coderdojo guys. The problem with games as motivation is that it is an attempt to motivate by topic rather than process.
Learning is an inherently rewarding process -- it is a pure form of mental stimulation. If the teaching is effective, it generates flow and the process becomes self-motivating... but to achieve this the process needs to have a low cognitive load and each step must be inherently meaningful.
Games, however, are complex beasts, and in order to teach with games you have to take a lot of shortcuts and provide a lot of "black-box" code that the beginning programmer can't and won't understand, which means the learning experience isn't entirely meaningful. There's really nothing more frustrating than achieving a result under instruction but not really knowing why it's working. You haven't learned the system. Worse -- those black-boxes can be munged up with lots of "simplifications" that not only obscure the code logic, but also reduce the human logic in the system (eg gamemaker, where increasing the score is done by adding a "setscore" event and ticking a little box marked "relative").
Learning programming has to start with learning how to overcome simple problems and slowly upping the complexity -- starting a course on programming with games is like taking someone who has done no maths and no physics and trying to teach them structural engineering.
Another example of bad teaching practice is that old favourite of programming books: "Hello world." Why do we start with a piece of code that doesn't actually do anything? In C, it's particularly bad. When I started learning C at uni, we were compiling and running from a Unix command prompt (or possibly Linux. In second year CS it was definitely Linux, although we were using Solaris in AI.) What would have been more meaningful than writing simple programs that carried out specific mathematical functions as an extension to the BASH command set? Instantly meaningful nd useful. Instead, we were struggling with C's esoteric consol IO functions for weeks in order to be at the stage where we could even start to do anything meaningful.
Whereas we could have been writing nth root programs and typing nthroot 1024 9 and getting the answer 2 within a day or two.
All subjects are easier to learn when every step is meaningful -- games offer no easy path to meaningfulness.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'