goto fail; — Challenges and Considerations for Teaching Programming to Kids
Slides for Ben Gotow’s lightning talk at Click 2014.
Ben runs Foundry 376, a mobile development shop based in Nashville. He studied Human Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon, with a focus in educational technology.
build a mental model of the environment you’re working in. Fail, understand what happened, try again. § Failure is extremely frustrating, and school teaches us that failure is bad. § Help students think through failure, build hypotheses, and decide what to try next. § Treat failure as well as success as progress in learning.
this is especially true of programming. § Self guided practice time leads to unchecked learning. § Small groups are awesome. § Enlist students to help their classmates learn. § Allow students to make their own projects so work isn’t directly comparable.
their own ideas, they’ll ask about things you don’t know. § “When I send an email, how does it know where to go?” -‐ Kindergartener § Show students how to use online resources. § Use class time to reinforce debugging and problem solving skills, let students learn speciUic tools on their own.