Re:Stop Teaching Code, Solicit Predictions Instead
by jfarmer on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @01:42PM
(#21641273)
I co-founded Dev Bootcamp where I was responsible for training our teachers and designing our curriculum. I 1000% endorse the article.
The author isn't suggesting students will "magically figure it out". He's helping them develop the muscles they need to articulate, build, and refine their own mental models.
You can get students making CS-relevant predictions without them having ever seen a single line of code in their lives within the first hour. Students will enter the world of programming with an orientation that enables them to learn 10x faster, which is even more critical in the coding bootcamp context.
Re:Stop Teaching Code, Solicit Predictions Instead
by neilobremski on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @12:16PM
(#21640308)
I have to agree. My wife is going through a bootcamp and I am stuck helping her with the fundamentals after the instructor tries to breeze past them. She's not a "figure it out later" kind of person and wants to know details upfront. Simply throwing a problem at her that she has no tools yet to solve creates a lot of frustration.
Re:Stop Teaching Code, Solicit Predictions Instead
by LegitGandalf on Tuesday November 26, 2019 @02:29PM
(#21641733)
Turns out people have different learning styles. I claim both of you are right!
That learning style thing has horrible consequences for about 40% of students in the American one size fits all public education model.
It's important to give context and ground your proposed problems in reality. Relatable content is the single most important part, so skip the "foo/bar" stuff and go for real-life examples. That's it! No need to write clickbait!
If you believe people with no coding experience will magically figure it out, you'll have a bad time and your students will hate you.