Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChicagoBoy11 | Hacker News Reader

How widespeard of a belief is this in the teaching community? I happen to completely agree with it, but I've also heard the opposite -- suggestions that dropping kids into professional coding environments would give them the feeling they were doing something "for real" and help motivate them. I feel that the cognitive load of these kinds of environments is so high, and the possibility to click something that breaks everything unexplainably so great, that introducing kids to programming using systems whose environment they could completely comprehend seemed like a no-brainer. Was wondering if there was evidence to this intution (or contrary to it).

The school where I work at is incidentally piloting a intro to computer programming course that uses Blender and Python for completely green 10yr olds. I don't see this turning out well; how doesn't it just devolve into a CTRL-C/CTRL-V bonanza?

View on HN

This is just a personal anecdote, but my first experience with programming was in an introductory CS course where Visual Studio was the default (but not mandatory) dev environment. Naturally, I used it instead of any CLI because I was an absolute beginner.

This is coming from someone who loves VS, but it is not something beginners should have to deal with. Some of my questions that distracted me from actually solving problems (note the technically incorrect usage of certain terms; this is intentional):

- Why is the options menu so huge?

- What the hell is a project?

- Oh my god I clicked in the thing and this red ball popped up and now the code won't move past it!

- Why do I need to build the project? Can't I just run my code in the file?

- Why do new menus pop up when I click "Run"?

- What the hell does "step into" and "step over" mean?

I think that a CLI or super basic IDE with minimal options and capabilities is the way to go when dealing with people who are beginners. On that same note, I do find it disheartening that many upper-division courses at college never bother with IDEs, and teachers tell students to just "figure it out on your own".

Yeah, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "What am I trying to learn, an IDE or programming?"

Both are valuable to know, but teaching someone how to be a mechanic without ever having them drive a car is a bit of a mess.

SmallBasic is probably a good idea for young students working through these problems.

I'm a big fan of VS for C# and IntelliJ for Java. Neither of these are Babby's First IDE, but once you have mastered the basic ideas of working in an IDE they pretty much work the way you would expect.

JetBrains' other IDEs and plugins have also been uniformly excellent, in my experience. The VC++ parts of VS are a lot rougher, but I suppose that's to be expected.

FWIW, I am a professional coder, and find Eclipse bewildering.

Same. Seriously, it's a fantastic example of "user interface designed by an engineer". It's not that I don't understand how to use Eclipse - sadly, it's an editor I have spent all too much time working with in various incarnations/skins. It's incredibly powerful and extensible (which unfortunately leads to it being used as a base for further IDEs built on top of it), it's just incredibly painful and unintuitive to use. You can do literally anything, it'll just be buried five menus deep inside some control panel.

Today I fired up Android Studio for the first time, and I literally cracked a smile and did a fistpump when I saw IntelliJ staring back at me instead of fucking Eclipse.

Android Studio has been the reason I've made $200+ of JetBrains purchases for personal use. I hope it's working out well for them.

Another vote of confidence for JetBrains here. Making the jump from Eclipse to phpStorm for Magento development was worth every single penny!

The only evidence I have is that game for adults called `Word'. I strongly believe they would be much better players if they sticked to Wordpad for a year or two before switching to Word (they might then realize they don't need it 99.9999% of the time).

I've switched to markdown for most of my personal stuff. In Word my typing content to formatting content was around 60/40. In markdown I format as I type and it's maybe 5% tops.

If you're like me and find yourself typing mostly the same few document types over and over it pays to spend a few hours and set up a latex template.

I've had a good bit of luck using Pandoc to fill in my latex templates from a markdown file.

Well depends what do you want to teach :)

I personally was introduced to programming as a hobby when I was 10y old, in an after-school class, where we used visual basic for applications. This was early 2000's and VBA editor bundled with every Office was suprisingly decent, and I remember quite fondly creatin random poem-generators spamming endless streams of message boxes :D So, if they manage to make their way around some thing ordinary but complex such as spreadsheet/presentation editor, I don't think bloated IDE's would be too much of a hinderance.

So even though in principle, I like the simplicity of repl for teaching somebody, my afternoon class 15 years ago didn't have problem with the "high cognitive load" :)

Regarding blender ... If you want to teach them basics of graphics/3d modeling first and then showcase the basic, and make them interactive with its drag&drop/node-based actor model ... it might be fun. But I haven't used blender in more than 5 years, so I don't really know, how much it supports the "game-dev-teaching" angle.

My experience TA'ing a classroom full of CS110 (introduction to programming for CS majors, taught in Java) was that the cognitive load of Eclipse was indeed very high. Most people preferred Netbeans. The people who did prefer Eclipse were the high-flyers who had done programming or worked in it previously.

Unfortunately I have found that NetBeans is often missing some functionality around the edges. For example, it doesn't support parameterized JUnit tests (they run, they count towards success/failure, but don't display in the GUI). That's not exactly new functionality either, they've been around since what, 2010? It's a shame because Netbeans is definitely a more polished environment.

I would suggest that you check out PyCharm and see if it suits your needs. Everything I've tried by JetBrains has been absolutely fantastic.

Is the Blender Game Engine workflow mostly like shown in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5HEyoDb-tw&index=64&list=PL...

I don't understand the appeal of learning programming without the beginning programmer being in charge of control flow.

Attaching scripts to things is useful for people with skills in using 3D tools, but now you have to introduce them to the concept of writing functions to be executed repeatedly in a loop without them being able to see the loop.

Student: How does it know to keep running my script?

Teacher: It runs every frame in a loop.

S: What's a loop?

T: teaches loops

S: Where's the loop that runs my script?

T: Deep inside the bowels of Blender.

S: Oh.

> suggestions that dropping kids into professional coding environments would give them the feeling they were doing something "for real" and help motivate them

People that say this have almost never actually tried to teach kids programming from scratch. Throw someone in the ocean and they will drown. Build up starting in a kiddie pool and after practice, they could be a life guard.

The same thing happens with computer science all the time. The very first thing taught is C++. I can't think of anything worse for someone who hasn't ever seen an if statement or a loop than to burden them with a deluge of functions whos motivations aren't clear until programming a large project for two years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com