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