[shannifin]

I had some math teachers who either did not understand math very well themselves and just regurgitated text books, or just didn't know how to teach it well (which, to be fair, can be challenging).

But the article states near the end:

> Conversational programmers struggle to find resources that help them learn because so many of them require a focus on the logic and mathematics, but we are developing approaches to help conversational programmers learn without the math. We might be able to teach a lot more people about programming if we don’t expect students to know mathematics first

I'm just not sure that's a great (or entirely workable) idea. Embrace the math!

That said, I don't think one has to learn the math first; you can learn math and programming at the same time. In fact, it is perhaps easier to learn math when you have a concrete programming context to apply it to. I taught myself the basics of algebra by teaching myself BASIC in elementary school, years before I had a clue what "algebra" was. By the time I was taking algebra classes, it was a breeze. (Calculus on the other hand....)