Hacker News Reader

Comment by pessimizer | Hacker News Reader

>I saw another article for an elementary school programming course, and I can’t believe how far off-base we have gotten.

I don't understand this post at all. There were programming classes at elementary school 25-30 years ago teaching Logo and Basic on Apple IIs. If it weren't for those classes, I can't really be sure that I'd be programming now.

So we shouldn't have programming classes for children now because confidence? Am I missing something, or does confidence often come with experience, especially experience gained in childhood when you're too young and stupid to be properly terrified?

If you want to raise adult mountain climbers, does it make sense to start your children climbing hills, or to spend their childhoods giving them the confidence to attempt to climb mountains as adults, oblivious to their own incompetence? I don't think confidence-building to the exclusion of skill-building is the way to go.

View on HN

I likely wouldn't be a developer today if not for elementary school.

I thought Logo was dumb and could never get into it, but one day after school in grade 6 I saw my friend had used Logo to open a command prompt on a school computer. He had gone into QBASIC and made a rocket ship fly using just print commands.

I was hooked instantly. I spent most of my non-school waking hours for the next few months coding in BASIC, entering programs from books I found buried in the library, and pouring through the help system to learn how to do new things.

Programming then really taught me to dig deep and figure things out on my own using resources available to me, and gave me a source of pride and confidence that I didn't get from other avenues. Eventually earning a great sense of accomplishment as I'd teach friends how to use various game engines that I'd develop at home.

Without that first experience in elementary school -- ultimately enabled through a feature of Logo -- I'd never have begun that journey.

My son writes programs using Python's turtle graphics, which reminds me of the Logo programming I did on my Vic 20 as a kid. Yesterday he was writing the same "input a number and then draw a polygon with that many sides" program I did a long time ago.

That's because Turtle Graphics is logo. In Python.

I loved logo, was a big inspiration for why I am a programmer today.

I'm pretty sure most of us learnt to program outside of school, and off our own backs. Isn't that the best way?

School is there to show kids how to teach themselves anything they want to learn. Not to spoonfeed them specific skills they may or may not want to have.

I'm pretty sure many(most?) of us started that process within school.

>Isn't that the best way?

Best for what? Best for being a good programmer? In my experience, no. You can't avoid spending 1000s of hours outside of school programming and reading about programming, but having fantastic teachers to help guide you through that journey is awesome when you can get it.

>School is there to show kids how to teach themselves anything they want to learn.

Not any school that I want my kids in. I want my kids in the school that teaches them how to read, add, and understand the science of the world around them - including how their stupid cellphone works. They've got the rest of their day and the rest of their lives (with a bit of latitude starting in the last half of high school, and college) to learn whatever they want, at least until all the libraries are closed and everything is behind a paywall.

I didn't get the feeling that school is there to teach kids how to teach themselves. That is very much a skill that I had to learn outside of school. School, even in a very nice area with excellent schools, felt like a long exercise in checking boxes.

There are things that did teach me "how to learn" but they only arose outside of school and after high school. There are things that have given me a fearless desire to learn, and the confidence to know that there's nothing I can't come to understand if I am willing to apply myself. However, none of those things happened inside of the traditional school system.

Teaching someone to learn should damn well include exposure to a lot of different things to help them see the use of learning. It should include a "sandbox" wherein they can learn skills without consequences of simple mistakes and other learning related "failure" instilling a fear of living life.

It should include a bunch of basic skills as well - because seriously, I'd rather be taught "here's the common, most successful way of doing X" rather than having to go out and discover it on my own for thousands of random skills. Does that mean one day I may have to give up my notion of "checkbook register" that is comfortable and I've known forever in favor of "proper double entry book keeping" - absolutely, and you know what, I'll take a class on that too. But in the mean time, I won't be figuring out how to track my dollars on my own, and in the future I won't rediscover double entry for myself. Why?

I'm too busy focusing on software stuff in depth. That's where I'm focusing my "learn for myself" talents and limited time.

> School is there to show kids how to teach themselves anything they want to learn. Not to spoonfeed them specific skills they may or may not want to have.

Eh, debatable. I'd tend to say that ideally school is there to give kids experience with a wide range of activities and to try to inspire in them a love of learning in at least one of them, as well as the basic methodologies of doing so.

I don't think spoon-feeding, or making people learn skills they blatantly don't like, has great returns. But I wouldn't go quite so far as saying school's just there to show them how to learn - considering how directed the learning environment is, school doesn't really seem to spend much time on that at all.

I wrote the post, you make an excellent point that it's good to have experience in order to gain confidence. I do believe we need to address the current holes in our education system before we start adding new course work, and that we need to work hard to help students to learn to overcome challenges and to have the confidence to attack all kinds of problems.

Programming is only one skill that people are afraid to learn, there are thousands of others and we can't have elementary school classes for them all.

Programming isn't only one skill, though, any more than writing or math is one skill. I think the point of elementary school is teaching enough basics that young people can navigate an area of study, have a good idea of its breadth, and decide whether they want to come back to it when they have more latitude about what they would like to study further. It also helps in business and citizenship, so you have an idea of what to pay for stuff, and you know what you're voting for.

>we can't have elementary school classes for them all.

We not only can have elementary school classes for it, we do, and have since I first walked into one 32 years ago. That fact is responsible for a large percentage of the programmers walking around today.

>we need to address the current holes in our education system before we start adding new course work

In my opinion, weakness in math (and programming) is one of the current holes in our education system. I'm also trying to argue that this is not new coursework.

I like you, you are well mannered and incredibly reasonable. I think it being or not being new coursework is a matter of location there were definitely no programming in my elementary school. I though I did start taking them in high school.

I think we look at computer programming much differently in terms of our world view and should probably leave it at that. Thanks for making some great comments and being a cool person.

Can't agree with you more.

Confidence that I could program came from being exposed to programming on Apple IIs and the Casio FX-702P. Being taught some simple graphing with BASIC in class laid the groundwork. Later came watching others create things, then trying out my own ideas in BASIC, failing, and then trying again.

This should be applied to other important fields as well -- for example a medical-themed biology class I took as a kid helped me understand that being a doctor was attainable (but not for me).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com