[chrisdone]

There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1ib43q3uXQ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.

[rzzzt]

OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yKf8TrLUOw

[kjs3]

This is worth watching even if you hate Excel and FP. It's a view of a different way of thinking. Good stuff.

[markdeloura]

Thanks for the link! It's a great discussion to have and should be a topic for all learning, not just CS Ed. If you look at the K-12 CS Ed standards defined at the state level, you'll find a generally coherent approach to staged learning of CS, both in terms of computational thinking structure (teach sequential behavior before conditional behavior) and language complexity (Scratch first, Java later). It's also worth considering playful or project-based approaches vs rigorous curricula-based learning... we're lucky to start with playfulness in CS because of the history of Logo. But what about for example, aeronautics? You might really enjoy learning to build and fly a rocket in Kerbal Space Program, but at some point you might yearn for more and benefit from a deep dive into some scaffolded traditional curricula. Then you can come back to Kerbal and apply what you learned, etc etc. Perhaps there's some sort of optimal cadence, different for each person and their interests. What's the analog for CS Ed?

[bjterry]

I found this talk pretty interesting. Thankfully, the speaker doesn't limit the talk to "starting the debate," one of the world's annoying rhetorical tricks. She actually comes out in favor of an identifiable, different pedagogical method, and is doing research to establish whether or not it is superior.