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posted by CoolHand on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:05AM   Printer-friendly
from the mmmmmm-pie dept.

Kids don't want to code. They want to solve problems us oldies can't perceive
...
When the Raspberry Pi shipped to a planet excited geeks in the middle of 2012, it changed the way we taught IT. That had always been the intention of creator Eben Upton. Give the kids the goods and they'll do the rest.

At first, it seemed as though the grownups were more excited than the kids, creating all sorts of wacky Pi-based projects. Fortunately, those grownups - eager for the respect of their peers - shared everything they learned, posting to blogs, StackOverflow, and thousands of other websites. Want to know how to blink an LED? Drive a motor? Read a sensor? Set up a web server? Within the first year, all of that was out there, all of it indexed, searchable, and useful to kids.
...
these kids are using sensors on a Raspberry Pi to read the air quality of the room, alerting asthmatics to seek an environment less likely to give them breathing problems. Over there - because sometimes the referees miss goals - a netball-crazed 11 year-old girl used an ultrasonic sensor and Raspberry Pi to create an automatic scoring system.

Consider three ten year-olds who fussed and fiddled with LittleBits - a mashup of Lego with the Internet of Things - until they found just the right combination of pieces to create a system that allows you to know whether that sushi tray gliding by on that continuous track has been sitting around a little too long to be safe to eat. (Their inspiration was a teacher who'd gotten sick from bad sushi.)

The examples of kids' projects in the article aren't particularly strong. Have Soylentils seen kids doing particularly cool things with RPi's or Arduinos?


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:40AM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:40AM (#229791) Journal

    Kids don't want to code. They want to solve problems us oldies can't perceive

    That sentence just seems so weird given the content of the article. It's really jarring.

    The first example is a remote monitoring solution/chat project. Remote monitoring/chatting is definitely something oldies have already perceived because the kids who made their own system, cobbled it together from existing code they could find online -- that means someone already perceived the problem and wrote a solution of sorts. Both video monitoring and instant messaging go back a long way.

    As for the first part of the sentence, the kids did code something -- the article makes it pretty clear they googled around for various things, glued them together, and they said that part was hard. But it being "hard" isn't the same as not wanting to do it. Gluing together some code, or making some tweaks to it, isn't super high level coding, but it isn't not coding either. It's the kind of things 11 year olds have done for a long time, it's just that in the old days, you started with copying the code out of a magazine by typing every character, rather than doing a select/copy/paste as kids would do today.

    I just don't understand what point he is trying to make with that sentence. He's describing kids doing what they've always done with whatever was available to them -- messing around with existing stuff to figure out how it works and accomplish something that isn't really new to the world, but is new to the kid, which is totally valuable because it sets the kid on a path to someday having the skills to make something new.

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  • (Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:14PM

    by gidds (589) on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:14PM (#231009)

    I read it as being about goals and desires.  And, even as an ageing geek, I think I partly share them.

    When I was young (way back in the mists of ancient time, in the days of isolated microcomputers), coding was play; I used to write programs for the sheer hell of it.  I'd spend hours making pretty patterns appear on the TV screen, making interesting sounds come out of the speaker, and even less productive stuff, simply because it was interesting to do, and I felt I'd accomplished something.

    These days, coding is work.  I spend too much of my time doing it for my employer to want to spend much of my spare time doing the same.  That's not to say I haven't created some small and medium-sized programming projects (and even a bit of algorithms research), but it's generally been to achieve some specific goal rather than for interest's sake alone.

    In other words, programming used to be the destination; now, it's more often the route I take to get somewhere else.

     

    And I suspect that's what the quote is saying about these kids: their interest in coding is not for its own sake, but for the other problems it allows them to solve.

    Which may be no bad thing; there's nothing like having a specific problem to solve to motivate you to learn the necessary skills, and persevere through the inevitable failures and frustrations.  And to give you the sense of satisfaction and achievement when you succeed!

    --
    [sig redacted]