Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Teaching Kids Programming in Japan

My friend Yasukawa Tatsuro had this to say about his experiences teaching kids to program in Japan.  There's some really good points in his short note.

I started to study programming with IDE not with Scratch or Blockly so I don't know if they feel frustrated about text based programming or CUI after getting used to GUI. For some part, it's true I guess. For programming, (for everything I guess) most important point is weather they are really into or not.
For teaching kids, I did rather played hour of code. It was so awesome. I could enjoy because it was like a game and I thought
it teaches programming concept well. Programming's most difficult part for beginner, I believe, is concept of programming. So starting from hour of code(blocky ) is good idea.  After that, you can teach kids how to draw a picture using `swampy`(I think you study `Think Python` so you know it !) then kids can understand how real program work. Also using Raspberry pi is good to teach `unix system` , CUI and programming( hardware hacking and it is fun for kids !).
 In my opinion, kids can start learning a programming if they know basic math like Geometry because after some points, they will stack with difficult problem which they cannot solve. For example, I taught 7 or 8 years kids but he stacked with geometrical problem.

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