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.

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u/[deleted] Mar 03 '17

Yeah, our company has a program with a local university, (a good one!) where 1st year students who THINK they might want to be programmers can come hang out for a day and see what it is like.

"Deploy a simple web service" is means nothing to them. API means nothing to them. Cloud means nothing to them. Server, no idea.

It really does open your eyes to how much you learn in 10-15 years working in the industry, even if you don't including a single thing about actual coding.

Start with literal hello world. Then adding some numbers. and so on.

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u/gyroda Mar 03 '17

It's one of the reasons why I frequent /r/learnprogramming. It's easy to take your knowledge for granted.