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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I have come across two fairly distinct methods of teaching programming. I would classify them as 'trying to impart intuition' vs. 'trying to impart knowledge.'

The former consists of teaching via gamified methods where students are made to play elaborate games consisting of programming puzzles, modify existing code to draw out 2-d shapes and animations, etc. Once students develop some familiarity with changing words in a file to make the computer do something, they are introduced to data types, data structures, control flow, etc.

The latter is a more 'rigorous' approach where students are taught the fundamentals such as data types, structures, flow, interpreter vs compiler, etc first; Then they are made to write programs. These programs are sometimes gamified but not to the extent as the former.

I consider the latter "imparting knowledge" method superior. It's more in line with all the hard sciences I have been taught and all the good programmers I am aware of claim to have been taught using this method. More on this later.

I want to push back on your last point.

I went to a university that was top 20 on this list and was one of the strongest programmers of my year and am currently working at a FAANG. My introduction to programming was in high school and was mostly self-taught -- I took two programming courses in high school but they were primarily HTML-oriented. Before college, I was never explicitly taught about if-statements or for-loops (though I had been using them for ~3 years) and didn't know asymptotic notation, heaps, hash tables, etc.

Then I got to college and voraciously consumed all the "formal" CS education. So to me, my education was primarily the former method and "I turned out fine". (Though I certainly would have appreciated getting a formal CS education a year or two earlier, and certainly rigorous education is necessary at some point).

The main caveat is that "move this frog around the screen to eat bugs" is kind of a pathetic attempt to gameify education and I would have hated it. Working on my own projects and actually achieving them made programming basically seem magical, and (imo) that's what made me super excited to learn the formal stuff when I got to college.

Yeah, I have kinda the same story.

First programming I did was on a graphic calculator, learning only from the manual of the calculator. Had no clue what loops where, or what a condition is, much less what a data structure is and why would I need that. I just wanted to have a program to so some calculations for me on a test, hacked away in BASIC.

Then when I finally got the proper programming courses everything fell into place, and I'm fully convinced that prior experience was essential. I was actually engaged learning about the more complex topics of programing.

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