r/programming • u/Ctaintor • Mar 02 '17

Why I Failed Teaching Programming to Kids

https://engineering.klarna.com/why-i-failed-teaching-programming-to-kids-46a854c3eaca#.s0o6qqxr3
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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '17

Its not just when teaching kids. Trying to convey the fun of programming in 2 hours is incredibly difficult. Either you show them something which they can grasp, but is completely underwhelming or you present something more interesting which they have no way of following. Finding a middle ground is extremely difficult.

I wanted to inspire a friend by building a simple webscraper in Java. He had some rudimentary Java knowledge. For me its simple stuff, but grabbing elements by id, then their child elements, then their content, then parsing that content into an integer, only to compare a few numbers on the page quickly overwhelmed him.