Rikers Inmates Learn How To Code Without Internet Access (fastcompany.com)

An anonymous reader sends the story of another prison where inmates are learning the basics of programming, despite having no access to the vast educational resources on the internet. Instructors from Columbia University have held a lengthy class at New York's Rikers Island prison to teach the basics of Python. Similar projects have been attempted in California and Oklahoma. The goal wasn’t to turn the students into professional-grade programmers in just a few classes, [Instructor Dennis] Tenen emphasizes, but to introduce them to the basics of programming and reasoning about algorithms and code. "It’s really to give people a taste, to get people excited about coding, in hopes that when they come out, they continue," says Tenen. ...Having an explicit goal—building the Twitter bot—helped the class focus its limited time quickly on learning to do concrete tasks, instead of getting bogged down in abstract discussions of syntax and algorithms.

Comments

Huh?

[gstoddart]

learning the basics of programming, despite having no access to the vast educational resources on the internet

Bah, when I learned programming there weren't "vast educational resources on the internet".

It's been done.

Since when the hell have we reached the point of "zomg, someone learned something without teh intertubes"??

Because if other people haven't learned to basics of coding over the last few decades without the use of the internet, I'd be completely shocked. The internet is not a pre-requisite to learning, as much as people seem to think it is.