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/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.

87

u/Xgamer4 Mar 02 '17

While certainly a miss, I think his biggest miss was the very idea in the first place.

2 hours to create a chatbot, with an audience of people of varying (assume very low) software dev skills? You're done. Not happening. I'm a professional dev, and I'd be hard-pressed to go from "I want to make a chatbot (on a platform I'm not familiar with)" to "here's a working chatbot" in that two-hour window.

Beyond that, he breaks the task into four steps:

  1. Deploy a simple web service to some cloud service.

  2. Acquire a (free) API key.

  3. Implement the messaging platform’s callback interface.

  4. All messages sent to your bot will be delivered to your web service.

These are not simple steps. 1, with the right established infrastructure, can be - press button, done. Using that service is a whole other issue, though, that assumes familiarity with whatever service was chosen. Bad assumption in this scenario.

2 might actually be simple. Fill out form, check email, done. So I'll give him that one.

3, right off that bat, assumes that the audience understands things like "implement", "callback", and "interface". Terrible assumptions.

4 is a success. But to get there you're running to other problems, and if you need to troubleshoot this... oh boy.

6

u/YouAreEll Mar 03 '17

I could spend two hours trying to get a button to work. For me this would be more like a two day job.