Last week, Walter Bender wrote:
[...] Perhaps the succinct way I can express my doubts is to assert that
no one has ever learned to program from reading a book (or attending
a MOOC). You can only learn to program by programming.
To which I made this private comment, thinking it would be offtopic
here:
I claim to have learned programming from a book in that I taught myself
BASIC and 8080 assembly language from a few magazines that I bought in
1978/1979 and wrote a bunch of programs on paper. I first had access to
a computer with BASIC in 1980 and a terminal into which I could type
8080 machine language in hex in 1981. Same thing for C, LISP and
Smalltalk - I had to create my own compilers/interpreters to run the
programs I had previously written on paper.
To be fair, I got a computer from Radio Shack in 1975 (when I was 13
years old) that could be programmed with wires like in a protoboard.
It had 10 switches and 10 lamps and was actually a neat idea for a an
educational toy. And in 1976 I got a programmable calculator from Texas
Instruments that could have 30 very primitive steps. So if someone would
prefer to consider that I first learned to program by programming before
I learned it from a book, I would have to respect that opinion.
The reason I wrote this is that my experience is probably rare, but
surely not unique. So if you use this argument you might find someone in
the audience contradicting you, which would be a pity since your
complaint about the hole in the wall thing is perfectly valid.
But Walter Bender replied:
You make a very good point. Your situation is far from unique and echos the
experience of some of the best hackers I know. But even in your description
of your experience, I think the book was serving more as a reference
and that your learning was from doing. That said, I kick around the number 7%
-- 7% will be successful regardless. They are sufficiently self-motivated
that they will seize any opportunity. You are one of the 7%.
Please share your observations with the iaep and devel lists. Would be
good to expand the discussion.
When I started working on a children's computer back in 1983 it was the
first time I gave my experience with schools any thought and it became
obvious that I had not been a typical student. That meant that I
couldn't design for myself, but instead had to understand what education
was like for other people.
Alan Kay once wrote that when you teach a group of children something
none of them have experienced before, about 10% of them learn so easily
that it is hard to believe they weren't already experts. Another 10%
never quite get it no matter what you do. He said that education is
about the remaining 80%.
-- Jecel
___
IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!)
IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
