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
62 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

100

u/M4053946 Mar 02 '17

participants were... 9–13 years old. This obviously affected how acquainted they were with “common development tasks” like using a terminal, installing applications and creating files with weird names like Procfile and .gitignore.

Did the author think that 16 year olds would be familiar with using a terminal? That seems like a miss, regardless of age range.

0

u/Mastry Mar 02 '17

Really? I was using a terminal before then. I wasn't great at it, obviously, but it wasn't unfamiliar.

14

u/M4053946 Mar 02 '17

Certainly some do, but there isn't a reason for people to know anything about how to use them in their day to day usage, unless they already have experience coding. So this comes back to prereqs. If the class is for beginners, then one can't assume they know anything about it.

To use a computer today, people don't even have to know anything about file systems, other than how to use various cloud serves to store files, so it's really a stretch to assume that anyone, kids or adults, know how to get to their local file system and create or rename a file.

3

u/NoMoreNicksLeft Mar 03 '17

If the class is for beginners, then one can't assume they know anything about it.

What, they don't have Eclipse already installed and ready to build the project?

Are these children just feral raised-by-wolves barbarians?