On Sep 14, 2004, at 12:33 AM, Jan Erik Mostr�m wrote:
On 2004-09-14 08.54, ColliverMJ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Do you feel programming should be taught to children in some way whilst they are at school ?
I think the question should be "What would the purpose be?"
I've heard three such purposes:
1) For students to learn how to program
2) To give students the aesthetic experience of going "inside" technology, rather than just using it (c.f. "Beyond Black Boxes" http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/archive/bbb/)
3) To teach a set of general transferrable skills; for example, a student might be better at debugging a toaster or logically analyzing a mathematics problem if they have developed strong programming skills
A brief opinion for each of these:
1) Most people don't need to learn how to program
2) How low [in terms of levels of abstraction] do you go?
3) Education theory has been debating the validity of trying to teach generally transferrable skills for at least a century. I don't know of any specific results for the ability of programming skills to transfer to other aspects of life, but it seems that making a rigorous argument for it would be difficult.
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