Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/30/new-animated-youtube-series-fo.html
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Think Like a Coder
I’m thinking like a coder right now.
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Cool! Thanks
Seems kinda like Gene Yang’s Secret Coders books as seen around this parts before in posts by @doctorow, and which I can recommend for young’uns from personal experience
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I’ve been playing a similar game with my almost 4yo daughter where I pretend to be a robot who hilariously (no really guys) bumps into walls when her instructions are unclear. I even had her teach me “functions” as short cuts to telling me how to pick things up and sit down. She really liked it.
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I was going to say something along the lines of “read some Ayn Rand and try to debug women who won’t have sex with you”, but then I realised that’s internalised hax0rphobia.
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So, first the kids are going to need to work out the User Stories including acceptance criteria, priority and number of Story Points for each (I recommend using the Fibonacci Sequence), keeping in mind the point value doesn’t represent how long each will take but rather how complex each Story is estimated to be. As they figure out what instructions to give the robot, they should make sure to start by figuring out how they would test the instruction sets and then design them with those tests in mind.
Hm, maybe Kanban would be more appropriate than Scrum in this particular circumstance, so no need to plan out Sprints…
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i’ve been trying to think like a coder for decades. no matter how hard i try i can’t shake the think like a motion designer mentality.
also, will this new series help my kid to not watch “painting squishies”, “making slime” and “mindless drivel” hosted by a brother and sister team? i’m so over that sh!t.
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Is it just me, or are all these ‘get children to code’ games/moves/books/websites boring as hell? My children did the ‘make the robot walk some steps and turn’ shtick a few times and then got completely bored with it.
Scratch is a bit better, but the resulting programs are so clunky graphically that they lost interest quite fast as well.
I’m currently teaching my daughter some real coding using SDL and while she doesn’t really understand everything yet she is thoroughly intrigued by this mystical language. (Se doesn’t really speak english, which make sit harder still).
I remember my first steps on the coding path in GW-BASIC, with the micro-soft GWBASIC manual. I didn’t speak english yet, at the time, which to me only heightened my curiosity. I just randomly tried all the commands in the book to see what they would do. Copying example programs from the book and randomly changing them hoping for something interesting to happen.
To me all the ‘get children to code’ programs seem dumbed down too much to me.
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The trick for me - back in the days of BASIC on a TRS-80 - was having something I really wanted to do, and then wondering if I could get a computer to do it. These games kinda do that backwards.
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Break down a big problem into very simple steps. That’s how I started in BASIC, and that’s the fundamental process for coding. There are fancy stuff people learn later that let coders think like mathematicians. Math is helpful for analysis, but it doesn’t usually make it easier to get something up and running.
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Very well said. It is backwards. Making the coding itself the purpose.
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I’m thinking like a Coda… right… about… NOW!
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Somehow seeing young’uns learning to code reminds me of the half-dozen or so people I’ve met who, by being born too early or lacking the opportunity, never learned programming, and thus were forced to invent the discipline from first principles (all while dismissing the idea that they could ever program because that was for ‘geniuses’…)
Creating analog business practices with an almost Rube Goldberg envelope message passing system (saved his company a few million dollars a year while he was there, but couldn’t survive his departure), multi-thousand line Lotus 1-2-3 macros, secretaries that master Report Writer on IBM Display Writer system (but “I’m only a secretary”).
In each case, I’ve been awed by those who invented variables, loops, conditionals, and occasionally functions (sometimes with parameters) using tools that were totally unsuited for the job, each claiming they couldn’t possibly be a programmer…
They are the clearest “I see where you’d be in an alternate reality” moments I’ve ever had.
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That’s how it is with most hobbies.
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People will try to use the tools they have at hand and they know best.
Spreadsheets are a kind of functional programs, and people could sometimes understand better the functional paradigm rather than the imperative one.
In the bad old days programming a calculator or a personal computer was the only way to get the task done. Besides home computer were sold with comprehensive manuals explaining how programming them in BASIC was done.
Was the same thing made for a grownup or a kid. I suppose that the other problem is the gamified versions for kids aren’t really interesting, real things are the most interesting.
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I’m just some old retired coder that is starting to think like a kid again.
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Well, if you are curious and experimenting, coding can be the purpose of course. But for that you first have to get hooked.
I was hooked because I was curious and experimenting with computers. These days it’s even easier to get into coding. You have a perfectly serviceable interpreter built into every web browser, and millions of lines of code embedded in most websites. (minifiers are making that a less useful resource)
otoh, it has become much harder to understand what’s actually happening in those black boxes beneath layers and layers of abstraction and indirection…
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