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.
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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?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:24AM
I see StackOverflow but where's GitHub?
Everybody knows coders copy from StackOverflow and paste to GitHub. That's just how coding is done.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:19PM
Yup. And, get this! The Raspberry Pi can't be initialized by anybody who doesn't have an HDMI TV and a bunch of other shit. We don't have those. So we have to visit those annoying women who do, and pork 'em. Cunts.
(Score: 1) by Pax on Sunday August 30 2015, @05:44PM
erm.. wrong, just plain wrong.
In fact you could not be more wrong if your name was W Wrongy Wrongenstein.
What looks like a simple stereo output 3.5mm socket is actually an 3.5mm combo composite video with stereo audio.
just like the ones that you used to get with the Nokia N900(yes i had one and they were great and awful all at the same time)
So if you can't even get that right I don't care what the other bunch of shit was.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @09:53AM
Score-sensitive basketball hoop [google.com]
Good thing that 11 year-old girl is netball-crazed instead, and an argument can be made that netball is not women's basketball. I mean, it's just not basketball without dribbling, am I right?
Uh-oh. Ball-tracking is patented.
Tracking balls in sports [google.com]
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:31AM
(Score: 2) by CRCulver on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:03AM
So now kids can cargo-cult blocks of code from websites just like millions of grownups who fancy themselves programmers?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:11AM
Yes. The kids are learning to be real rockstar coders.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mtrycz on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:20AM
I just can't immagine the satsfaction of a 9-10 year old with accomplishing, actually finishing a project, making something useful. That's a whole other league than just coding; there will always be time for learning that (and btw, it's still quite impressive that a 9-10 yo can copypaste code and still make it work).
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:26PM
Roger that. The goal of programming is to make something useful. GP is essentially bitching that they just used LEGO blocks instead of molding them themselves first.
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot: Good programmers borrow, great programmers steal.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:59PM
And let me tag along with what you're saying and ask, "Who does teach computing from the ground up?" Who? Everything I have ever seen, my whole life, pre-supposes that you install some program or OS or have some hardware platform before they begin to teach you something built on that platform. Even if you're at university, you cannot drill down to the utter basics because the professors will always wave their hands and say, "let's assume you have this..."
That being the case (and how I wish it wasn't!), how can any level of tool-user decry the level of tool-use made available to children to get them excited about building stuff?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1) by OwMyBrain on Monday August 31 2015, @03:10PM
In my computer science program I was require to take a sophomore level EE course that taught computer design starting with the transistor. Or are you upset that they didn't go over doping my own silicon?
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:53AM
Yeah, right, those kids would better discover arithmetic by themselves, no multiplication table for them.
Only the grown-up are allowed to copy-pasta.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:17PM
To be fair, every piece of code we write that isn't expressed in the lowest possible Turing-complete abstraction-layer (only slightly higher then logic gates circuit design - maybe assembly but micro-code is the most likely candidate) is a copy-paste operation from one abstraction level to the next.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Sunday August 30 2015, @03:53PM
Haha yes, because you never use code libraries? Wait, what, you have done? You mean you used a function written by someone else in your code? Pffft, frickin' wannabe. Unless you were dropped in an open woodland, flint-knapped basic tools from what you found in a stream bed, identified ore and smelted it into advanced components, and built up a functional processor and OS to run on top of it all by yourself, you're a frickin' poser.
Or, you could not say silly things like "technologists should not use available tools to accomplish tasks."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hemocyanin on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:40AM
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.
(Score: 2) by gidds on Tuesday September 01 2015, @10:14PM
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]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 30 2015, @12:38PM
Mine is currently doing less than exciting duty as a media center PC in the living room. May not sound like much but my roommate's kids have watched thousands of hours of my anime collection on it with the only effort on my part being installing OSMC to an SD card and setting up NFS.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Funny) by zugedneb on Sunday August 30 2015, @01:10PM
...thousands of hours of my anime collection...
tell us about your collection :]
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday August 30 2015, @04:50PM
It's boring too. No hentai or even ecchi. Currently have them watching Naruto because there's so much of it that I won't have to find them something else to watch for quite a long time.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by albert on Sunday August 30 2015, @08:22PM
Suppose a person wants to practice embedded programming. Ideally there would be a board that:
1. includes a wide variety of sensors and actuators (including I2C, SPI, and analog) without needing to solder or buy expensive weird connectors
2. supports uClinux, RT-Linux, RTEMS, FreeRTOS, Contiki, and eCOS
I can't find such a board, though this one looks close. Some of the OS ports look pretty dead and incomplete. You have to find the right add-on board, which might not exist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 30 2015, @10:47PM
Have a look at the ESP8266 http://hackerspace.pbworks.com/w/page/88183850/ESP8266 [pbworks.com], https://github.com/esp8266/Arduino [github.com]; it can even be programmed with the Arduino IDE
(Score: 2) by VortexCortex on Sunday August 30 2015, @11:48PM
I taught myself to code at age 8. By 9 I made a brickout clone that was more popular in the computer lab than Number Munchers, Oregon Trail, or any of the other crap they made us play. This was possible because the hardware would boot to a "root" prompt and dare you to explore. Now Apple wants to charge you $100 for the ability to create code on "their" devices, QBASIC is gone from MS OSs. The browser is the new command prompt; Thus, JS is the new BASIC, but it sucks to be trapped in an abusive relationship with a flaky browser with all its unintuitive cruft writing code your friends might not be able run even with the same hardware and OS (now they need a compatible browser too).
Most kids don't really want to code -- this has always been true. Others may like creating via drawing, music, story telling (not necessarily writing), physical construction, sports, etc. (creating with sports? Yes, you can design your own sport). The trick is to use technology to enable them all to collaborate on projects together so the "artsy" kids don't feel left out, the "sporty" kid won't feel pent-up and bored, and the "techy" kids don't feel ostracized for liking tedious code and electronics. E.g., one of our most successful projects was a laser tag clone with bases having programmable targets. Each team had to have 4 active non-person targets. Some targets were wireless and hot-glued to RC cars, others targets were stationary "networked" devices (some networked via speaker wire ran to a parallel port). We soon had more than 8 targets per team and the "Sysop" of each team played a meta-game by switching active targets in the array according to current battle field advantage in the game (so even the asthmatic kid could play this sport). The artsy kids decorated the targets / vests with their team's style so you could tell them apart. The sporty kids field tested the equipment and battle field configuration -- we had to move some things around to make it more fair and fun.
The thing that draws kids in seems to be making something that other people will use. It doesn't matter if it's a GUI for your battle field, a sensor for laser pointer "guns", a paper mache pony helmet, or a "target captured" sound effect. My point is: It's the act of creation that should be promoted rather than the medium. Hackers aren't limited to hacking any one area of life. IMO, stop focusing on the "kids using hardware" angle and simply enrich creative spaces with tech as just another material or canvas to create with. The sooner there's nothing special about tech-embedded in kids' creative efforts the more advanced the future will be. Everyone writing any code today is making things the hardware MFG didn't imagine, So what? Sensationalism Fail.
What's cheaper than Raspberry Pi and easier to make LEDs blink and stepper motors work with? Beige Box PCs that have parallel ports. The bits map directly to the pins. No need for fancy (de)serialization chips/code, just plug the wires directly from the port into your bread board w/ LEDs and see them light up corresponding to the bits you're reading and writing via the computer code. Think about it: You need a "Shield" to (de)serialize things and give you a parallel interface. WTF? Just use hardware with a parallel port. Bonus, when the neighborhood kids fry one, I've got 50 more in the garage scavenged from dumpsters or donated as electronics recycling. If you think the little buggers have a grin when using an expensive desktop computer to program a proprietary embedded system over serial interface with copy and pasted code from the net, you should see their faces when they get to tear down their very own computer case, connect wires directly, and pull something off on the actual machine they're programming with -- esp. if that "something" makes the machine give up its magic blue smoke. We have a pile of slightly broken machines just to finish torturing to death. Kids wouldn't be able to explore as freely if we were risking the sacrifice of an R.P. each time they picked up a soldering iron.
If a single board computer's form factor is key, then a quick search will turn up better alternatives in price or in power than the Raspberry Pi.
(Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Monday August 31 2015, @02:17AM
>>Yes, you can design your own sport
Calvinball !!!
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