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by antiform
6192 days ago
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Does anybody here know somebody that has used this program to aid their learning of computer science concepts? It's certainly an admirable cause, but is this a better introduction to programming than something like Logo, which has been used to teach programming to kids for many years? Alice is impressive, and you can see the obvious programming influence, but it seems like "Moviemaker with control flow and objects" more than anything else. What problem is it trying to solve? For me, the hardest part of learning elementary computer science was not things like OOP or if-statements, it was data structures, algorithms, and the difficulty of keeping many different interactions in your headspace. It seems like in many CS programs, the data structures or algorithms class is the "weeder" that separates the CS majors from the wannabe CS majors. Personally, I believe the drop-off at this level is more important to address than how many students enroll in CS 101. |
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Step two is to figure out if they're any good at that.
A good childhood should be spent breaking the ice on numerous possible interests and finding out what works with you and what doesn't. Everybody gets abundant opportunity today to figure out whether they like sports, of all kinds; we could do with more (good!) opportunities to figure out if you like programming, or many of the other interests and hobbies that few children ever get exposed to. Most won't be any good at programming. That's OK, because everybody should be trying lots of things, and you won't be terribly good at most of them. (Where "good" here includes some concept of enjoying it enough to want to do it on your own, along with raw talent.)