[Yr7-10it] Re : .. Programming for all levels

[Dr Paul Chandler]

Programming and me:

Learnt programing as a formal part of school
Found it fascinating, and invested lots of time doing projects which used the techniques I had learnt at school, but extended them
Friends helped a bit (took me forever to get the idea of loops), but moreoften, I was the one to help the friends!
Continued learning at Uni (I have a comp sci major)
The sorts of techniques I learnt were integral to the projects I wanted to take on (eg found an application for LL(1) parser for a mail processor)

In short, I found that I could do the comp sci projects set for me at Uni within the time available (in those days, our number of minutes of online was limited) [but I know that others struggled], but I believe it was greatly supplemented by an enduring interest and time spent outside the formal curriculum.

-----Original Message-----
From: yr7-10it-bounces at edulists.com.au on behalf of Costello, Rob R
Sent: Mon 9/17/2007 9:23 PM
To: yr7-10it at edulists.com.au
Subject: [Yr7-10it] Re : .. Programming for all levels 
 


Following all these programming discussions with interest 

Here's a thought for you... 

How did you all learn programming? 

What role did formal school have, if any? 

How much personal time? 

I remember reading something David Perkins said - that in his
observations - circa 1985 - none of the budding student programmers he
observed had arrived at any competence without a huge personal
investment of time  

I've gone into bat for Logo in school at times - along the lines of
thinking "where is the DNA for a programming mindset for students,
unless we offer something parallel to the BASIC language I learnt".  

But maybe its the lack of a "BASIC" that is the real problem - a generic
(and fairly common) "Beginners All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" on
most computers  - and I guess that's whats under discussion in all these
discussions - whats the best "BASIC" these days.  
Maybe we just need to put a few good tools in their hands and start them
off - Alice, Scratch, Gamemaker, Squeak - whatever. 

Let those who like it, run with it 

Maybe not Javascript, C#, Java, Actionscript etc 

At least, not at first 

Harder to get to an independent / creative level there, I reckon 

(In spite of the prevalence of Javascript on the web, I think its pretty
hard to deeply "get", without an OOP background) 

I like the visual drag and drop of GameMaker - although it's a pity it
doesn't show the corresponding code when you drag in an "icon" - and I
feel the pure coding side of GM is still quite tricky, a "curly bracket"
language,  with events, object level scope etc - compared to the old
procedural BASIC, its not easy.  
I know kids can dabble in a bit of code in GM, on top of their visual
stuff, which is nice - but again how much are they "getting" in a
transferable way.  I love its visual productivity - pity it doesn't show
the code of their visual efforts - a little like recording a visual
basic macro. 

 I reckon VB is ok - if you can avoid the temptation to go GUI too early
- but the language has got so cluttered its not as much of a beginners
sand pit (.net even less so) 

Anyway  

How did you all learn programming? 

Cheers 

Rob  


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