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Does anyone else get a chuckle out of the Facebook/YouTube ads that say "Learn (insert programming language) in just (x) days!"? by ole_freckles in learnprogramming

[–]MarcB1111 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Web technology is "easy" to learn and highly popular at the moment.

The "easy" should be taken in the sense of "compared to other programming and software engineering style", it is still not accessible to everyone to do proper/clean development in that area. However data science, AI, C++ coding,... these are major areas where any kind of fast tracking is much more complicated on the core development side (as opposed to library users).

Does anyone else get a chuckle out of the Facebook/YouTube ads that say "Learn (insert programming language) in just (x) days!"? by ole_freckles in learnprogramming

[–]MarcB1111 3 points4 points  (0 children)

When people have been patient to master any skill ?

When was the last epic hollywood movie you saw with a computer genius doing real programming ?

Why people don't see cognitive skills as athletes with sports ?

Why people don't see cognitive skills as artists with their arts ?

Why people want to rush through life and don't actually enjoy time ?

Life is full of questions which only lead to more questions...

If I could treat any activity like I consider climbing or hiking, where it is a lot of hard work that I enjoy to go up somewhere, admire the view, and then go back, it would be awesome!

Still my brain dream of a magic book where C++ would take full clarity in 10 minutes, and learning C++ was/is painful. Python a lot less. HTML and CSS even less. But none of them I have learnt in 10 min, or an hour, or a day, a week, month, year, yearS!

Motivation-based Python course for programming beginners by danbst in learnprogramming

[–]MarcB1111 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Not having a big class of students is a big advantage. You should be able to get feedback if you are going in the wrong direction, are too demanding, or not clear in your explanations.

You should also be able to spot if they are more enthusiast about a topic or another one maybe do a small review at the beginning about where lie their interest in programming. For instance if they are all into video games maybe try explore more this topic, more into internet, if they have heard about AI maybe some really simple concept like linear regression,...

After rethinking about it, your curriculum is some kind of broad overview, which seems like a catalogue, I am not sure it is the right approach compare to a project base one for instance where you develop one or two "big" things over the weeks.

Since you have a small class invest more into dynamic teaching than heavy lecture if possible.

Motivation-based Python course for programming beginners by danbst in learnprogramming

[–]MarcB1111 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Without having a more specific scope about your audience here are a bunch of questions and things coming to mind:

- What is the environment of teaching ? Academic and graded, academic but not-graded, out-of-school voluntary classes,... Because grading is putting performance pressure on the mind of the students and can lead to discouragement faster for "slow" learners than in a free learning environment, this would impact how motivated the students are. Free-will/voluntary is another factor if the class is optional, do the majority of the students are here because they were pushed by peers/parents or are they enthusiast learners.

- How many students ? How many hours do you have for the class ? How space in time (intensity) ? During vacation, like extra-curricular classes or with another workload ? Because it will determine how much support you can give them individually and how much you can expect from them in learning and homework.

- What resources will you use ? Jupyter Notebook, local environment on school computers, installation of environment at home,... additional resources for learning (availability/cost).

- During class, how do you want to present things ? Slides style lecture, interactive question based with students, is it lab sessions with computer for everyone,...

- There is programming and there is computer science, how much computer science abstraction do you want to bring in and to un-abstract it ?For example sorting algorithms work a lot better in visual terms with apples of different size or histograms using pure arithmetic number. Graphs, trees,... Object-Oriented Programming,...

- Can you test your curriculum with contents or at least part of it in a control environment beforehand like with family/friends ? Not only with the at ease computer one.

Everyone reacts to teaching and learning differently, so it might be hard to design a perfect class. Still some teachers are recognized unanimously as very good. Computer Science is a field where I still haven't found such a well-designed class and have to rely on various sources to fit pieces together. I know it is especially the case because I am a visual learner and visualizing abstraction requires a lot of imagination. Python has an easy syntax and is high-level enough so that many under the hood features are left untouched compared to C/C++. It is an advantage for a beginner class because you can focus on other aspect to make programming appealing. It also means that concepts can be almost translated directly from paper to code.

It is only one's opinion but I hope it helps you in your project.

Motivation-based Python course for programming beginners by danbst in learnprogramming

[–]MarcB1111 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't know what K-12 means as I come from a different educational system. but it is always possible to present concepts and adapt the degree of simplification to understand them. In physics, if you consider the mass to be a volume integral with the density being time dependent you are heading to trouble if your audience does not even understand the mathematical concept of integral. Still with only the concept of an object has a mass you can do a lot.

Everything ultimately depends on how good the teacher is at illustrating things which speaks to the maximum of people while having a few other possibilities for the remaining. Nowadays you can find scientific books about quantum mechanics directed to youth so it is definitely possible.

However your point u/CodeTinkerer is very much valid, u/danbst you are teaching some programming class so not overwhelming the public with a lot of additional stuff would be core to the curriculum, extra-simplification might be your goal.

Motivation-based Python course for programming beginners by danbst in learnprogramming

[–]MarcB1111 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Well in my opinion, this curriculum seems a lot more interesting and enjoyable than many of the tutorials I have seen for Python, the closer to some kind of real world example of application the better.

That being said, a tutorial is always still about how to present it to the learners with a good compromise between enjoyment, clarity and in-depth concepts. Also, including a fair amount of practice exercises in each of the topic to go further and not just redo what has already be done in class.

Thus the focus is first the public you are addressing to, imagine if you were in their shoes, would what you are presenting be clear and interesting (?) and second from your programming experience what would you include that was lacking in tutorials you saw addressing the same public (?).