Teaching programming

Steve

Feathers wrote: »

Disagree with this to be honest. Someone said something similar to me in work recently — they got into programming because they wanted their computer to do XYZ in a programme that it didn't currently & because they'd access to the source, they tinkered with it themselves.

I don't know if anyone will go into programming from cold that way anymore (you might do this stuff when already a programmer to make something better, but not going from scratch). If you want to do anything on a computer nowadays, I doubt you'll need to learn to programme to get it done.

If the kid isn't sure if he wants to get into programming or not, I think you're better off showing him something that he can get 'quick wins' on to hook him in.

Again, like Processing that I linked to above — comes with loads of examples that can be hacked. There's one that will render a video feed from your webcam as streamed ascii art. Straight off, it's cool to play around with & then you can start tinkering — reducing the character set used, font-size; messing with opacity; see can you make that interactive via the keyboard; don't know what this line does, what happens if I delete it?

If someone has no coding background, they're more likely to get interested through something higher level that they can see results in earlier, than learning C from scratch, IMO.

Whilst that's a good way to foster interest in programming, it's an extremely bad way to learn IMO.
I'm sure everyone here is guilty of using Google to write code at some point, however, unless you understand the basic fundamentals behind it then tinkering blindly to see what breaks only leads to the dark side.
I speak from experience there where clients insisted on full source code as part of the contract and then expect me to be able to diagnose /fix bugs (caused by over-enthusiastic yet well intentioned tinkering) without telling me that they changed something.

Point is, if you really want to learn then the only way to do so is start from scratch. Yes, use the internet for assistance but make sure you understand what it is you are copy pasta - otherwise it's of no use.

stevenmu

Small Basic is a pretty cool learning tool. There's a bunch of tutorials, it supports simple Logo turtle style stuff and more advanced graphical stuff (while still being simple to do), it comes with a light IDE that's easy to use but useful too, and you can "publish" the programs to run on a website to share them.

Zipppy

BASIC or C will get anyone off to a START in programming CONCEPTS....no need for visual programming at the outset .. concepts are required if one is to move on ....

Marina-anseo

I recommend the Head First books, they don't go into huge detail but they keep your attention and he will have a working program at the end. He can then use internet sources to understand how to tweak things.

Feathers

Steve wrote: »

Whilst that's a good way to foster interest in programming, it's an extremely bad way to learn IMO.
I'm sure everyone here is guilty of using Google to write code at some point, however, unless you understand the basic fundamentals behind it then tinkering blindly to see what breaks only leads to the dark side.
I speak from experience there where clients insisted on full source code as part of the contract and then expect me to be able to diagnose /fix bugs (caused by over-enthusiastic yet well intentioned tinkering) without telling me that they changed something.

Point is, if you really want to learn then the only way to do so is start from scratch. Yes, use the internet for assistance but make sure you understand what it is you are copy pasta - otherwise it's of no use.

Definitely agree with the above 100% & rereading the thread, the OP does say he wants to teach the kid programming. (Not sure why, just read it as talking about getting someone interested to see if they want to take it further, rather than properly teaching )

ChRoMe

Zipppy wrote: »

BASIC or C will get anyone off to a START in programming CONCEPTS....no need for visual programming at the outset .. concepts are required if one is to move on ....

You would really have to hate the person to start them off in C!