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You Don't Have To Be Good At Math To Learn To Code
HughPickens.com writes: Olga Khazan writes in The Atlantic that learning to program involves a lot of Googling, logic, and trial-and-error—but almost nothing beyond fourth-grade arithmetic. Victoria Fine explains how she taught herself how to code despite hating math. Her secret? Lots and lots of Googling. "Like any good Google query, a successful answer depended on asking the right question. "How do I make a website red" was not nearly as successful a question as "CSS color values HEX red" combined with "CSS background color." I spent a lot of time learning to Google like a pro. I carefully learned the vocabulary of HTML so I knew what I was talking about when I asked the Internet for answers." According to Khazan while it's true that some types of code look a little like equations, you don't really have to solve them, just know where they go and what they do. "In most cases you can see that the hard maths (the physical and geometry) is either done by a computer or has been done by someone else. While the calculations do happen and are essential to the successful running of the program, the programmer does not need to know how they are done." Khazan says that in order to figure out what your program should say, you're going to need some basic logic skills and you'll need to be skilled at copying and pasting things from online repositories and tweaking them slightly. "But humanities majors, fresh off writing reams of term papers, are probably more talented at that than math majors are."
I spoke to a computer science professor about 2–3 years ago who said he had noticed a curious thing over the last few years. The students in his classes didn't seem interested--or even willing to--in solving programming problems. They just expected to be able to come in, download this framework and that framework, find a solution to a tricky problem on Stackoverflow (or wherever), and maybe write some really rudimentary code to just glue the bits together. Many of the "old " assignments--implement three different sorting algorithms and compare their properties just seemed totally archaic to his students--why would you ever want to actually write a sorting algorithm? After all, somebody out there has already done it better, and that's nothing you would ever need to do as real programmer.
The professor was somewhat alarmed by this, but not totally in disaster mode, because it was probably true that MOST of his students would never need to write a sorting algorithm. Most of his students would never need to implement an algorithm that draws a circle, etc. But still--this was computer science--not community college.
The writer here seems to fall squarely into this class of learner. Honestly, the first thing this article made me think of was that awful Barbie learns programming book where Barbie gets some other people to write the code for a program she designed, thereby becoming a real computer programmer. Maybe the book wasn't that far off the mark after all...
Math is a tool like a hammer or a screw driver. A carpenter typically does not love their tools, but they sure know which one to use with a nail or a screw.
Math is being taught wrong. Most math teachers love their subject and do not understand why the students do not also love the subject, when they provide no practical use. Practical uses are many, such as amortization, 3D physics accurate simulation, and robotics.
For example, I teach typical HIGH SCHOOL students bubble sort, then merge sort using recursion in GCC. We then create a list of 1,000,000 fake names using "rig", and temporarily replace the /usr/bin/sort program with our own, discussing the big O.
The students typically enjoy these assignments as they begin to understand the GNU tools, and have a practical use for both math and logic. The problem solving process and application of new concepts are valuable whether or not students will ever write a sort program again in their lives.