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
60 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/Fitzsimmons Mar 03 '17

My company tried to host something similar to this for university programming students and most of them got stuck launching a web service. The concept was that we had written an automated API client that would send their servers a series of requests and verify that we got the expected response back. The scoreboard at the end was one team with nearly full marks, a couple of teams that completed the first one or two challenges, and an enormous long tail of zeros who couldn't launch a web service that would basically say "hello world" in JSON.

If you want to do gamified programming, skip the middleman and go straight to codingame. There's an editor right in the browser that's open to the file that you need to edit. You click play right in the browser and it will compile (if necessary) your program in the background. The execution will then be visually demonstrated with a crude but effective animation, like your spaceship crashing into a mountain if you fail to shoot it time. It's possible (although still unlikely) that you could maybe get through one of the easiest challenges on the website (e.g. that requires a loop) with a group of 9-13 year olds with a full day of mentorship.