Resource: Learnable Programming
Jeffrey
As part of our education work, we'll be using google groups to share important resources and conversations. I'd like to start with a recent analysis of online teaching systems for programming. Education faces the challenge of how game making can act as a portal to and pathway for learning programming and computer science. For the programmers in our group, Bret Victor's site Learnable Programming, challenges some of our basic conceptions of what learning programming does and how it works.
Precis:
"Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types. Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning:
- Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about "for" loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw.
- People understand what they can see. If a programmer cannot see what a program is doing, she can't understand it.
How do we get people to understand programming? We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people."