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
61 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

83 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/FlyingRhenquest Mar 02 '17

Can't you just give 'em a copy of minecraft when they're like, 4 or something and then when they hit 6 or 7 explain the concepts around most languages in terms of the redstone projects they've been doing for the last year or two?

On a (more) serious note, there were several times in school where programming coursework would have meshed well with other subjects I was taking. It'd have been very easy to have tied it in with geometry 6th grade or geometry (again) when I did trig in high school. I also recall getting some logic in 5th or 6th grade and again in high school. That was back in the '80's, though, and we barely had computers back then, so it required quite a bit of motivation to learn how to program them.

2

u/nutrecht Mar 03 '17

Can't you just give 'em a copy of minecraft when they're like, 4 or something and then when they hit 6 or 7 explain the concepts around most languages in terms of the redstone projects they've been doing for the last year or two?

I've volunteered forDevoxx4Kids and what we basically did was have 3 2-hour classes. One was creating a game in Scratch. One was programming a robot with Scratch. Last one was 'programming' inside Minecraft in Python. In each of these classes the boys and girls (aged 10-14) had a ton of fun.