[ybroze]

There's a general principle that's at work here for certain concepts: it's often a good idea to teach children technology skills in terms of the technology's historical development.

Riding a bicycle is certainly one; the earliest velocipedes had no pedals at all, and are essentially the "balance bikes" mentioned here.

Mathematics and computer science is another one -- no matter how elegant it can feel to construct a world from teaching in first principles first, the historical pedagogy is much more intuitive and effective, IMO.

[eru]

What you suggest works, but it's also somewhat of a false dilemma.

For eg math you don't have to pick between historical development or axiomatic approaches, you can make up a new order of presentation from scratch.

Take category theory. The historical approach requires lots of advanced maths [0], and the purely axiomatic approach is basically way to abstract for anyone to get any intuition of why this is useful.

By comparison, it's relatively easy to teach someone some basic programming, and then go more abstract from there.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_category_theory_an...