goto fail; — Challenges and Considerations for Teaching Programming to Kids

Slides for Ben Gotow’s lightning talk at Click 2014.

Ben runs Foundry 376, a mobile development shop based in Nashville. He studied Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, with a focus in educational technology.

Transcript

1. goto  fail;  
   Challenges  and  Considerations  for  Teaching  
   Programming  to  Kids  
   Ben  Gotow  
   

   View Slide

2. Me  
   

   View Slide

3. Me  
   

   View Slide

4. Let’s  Get  Programming  
   §  Give  children  the  tools  to  be  creators  and  empower  
   them  to  build.  
   §  Programming  teaches:  
   §  Logic  and  reasoning  
   §  Emotional  development  
   §  How  other  subjects  can  be  applied  
   

   View Slide

5. Programming  is  hard.  
   Teaching  is  hard.  
   

   View Slide

6. Failure  
   §  To  learn  to  program,  you  need  to  build  a  mental  
   model  of  the  environment  you’re  working  in.  Fail,  
   understand  what  happened,  try  again.  
   §  Failure  is  extremely  frustrating,  and  school  teaches  us  
   that  failure  is  bad.  
   §  Help  students  think  through  failure,  build  hypotheses,  
   and  decide  what  to  try  next.  
   §  Treat  failure  as  well  as  success  as  progress  in  learning.  
   

   View Slide

7. Learning  Paths  
   §  Everyone  learns  at  different  rates,  and  this  is  
   especially  true  of  programming.  
   §  Self  guided  practice  time  leads  to  unchecked  learning.  
   §  Small  groups  are  awesome.  
   §  Enlist  students  to  help  their  classmates  learn.  
   §  Allow  students  to  make  their  own  projects  so  work  isn’t  
   directly  comparable.  
   

   View Slide

8. Lots  of  Questions  
   §  Once  students  start  building  off  their  own  ideas,  
   they’ll  ask  about  things  you  don’t  know.  
   §  “When  I  send  an  email,  how  does  it  know  where  to  
   go?”  -­‐  Kindergartener  
   §  Show  students  how  to  use  online  resources.  
   §  Use  class  time  to  reinforce  debugging  and  problem  
   solving  skills,  let  students  learn  speciUic  tools  on  their  
   own.  
   

   View Slide

9. No  Right  Answers  
   §  Once  students  get  through  introductory  materials,  
   there  often  aren’t  right  answers.  
   §  Help  students  create  goals  and  establish  whether  
   they’ve  reached  their  goals.  
   §  Focus  on  what    
   

   View Slide

10. View Slide