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Education

At What Age is it Easier to Learn? 103

Posted by Cliff from the depends-on-the-subject-matter dept.
Maria D asks: "At what age do people learn faster? Suppose you want to learn to write code at a certain level. What age ranges will absorb the lessons the best? There is surprisingly little research on post-early-childhood development. A language won't be quite native if you start learning it after five or so, but what about adult differences? From informal observations in graduate schools, I've concluded that older people learn faster because of their experience in learning techniques, which seems so counterintuitive!"
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At What Age is it Easier to Learn? More

At What Age is it Easier to Learn?

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  • FP (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Shadow_139 ( 707786 )
    FP


    Age 3 and lower...
    • So, if you must find the fastest person to learn how to program your computer to say "Hello, world"... You will pick a two year old?
      • I was doing basic programing at the age of 5 or 6. heh.
        • Was your learning of the programming back at the age of 5 or 6 faster or slower than it is now?
          • It's different, that's for sure. when I was that age, I just wanted to know what it did, how to do stuff, and why.... and just keep playing for hours.... yet i did find that due to my limitations, i got very frustrated. i simply didnt have the life experience or logic to fully understand it. I started HTML at 10, and found is relatively straightforward, and if i'd actually have read info about it in books i probably would have been fluent by 11......

            i started perl programming at 12 and to start with found
  • I'm hardly the person to ask on this, but I think I may be able to provide some insight. Language acquisition seems to be fundamentally different from learning the solutions to other types of problems. Computer code is a very additive learning process - it can be taught most easily (I think) by teaching it as a combination of pre-existing skills. It heavily involves mathematics, logic, "common sense", and breaking down a complex problem into many component parts.

    Linguistics appears to be totally opposite. Though there are animals that can learn very basic linguistic abilities, though they are able to do many things that *look* like language, no chimpanzee, gorilla, or other (dolphins, etc) has ever been shown to actually use language. Likewise, no matter how much fundamental knowledge of grammar you possess, translating that knowledge into easily learning another language as a fluent language is extrodinarily difficult or even impossible (I'm learning two dead languages, Latin and Greek, so I feel confident to make this sort of statement).

    Children aren't good at doing all of the componentry involved in learning computer code. It's impossible to explain memory allocation to someone who doesn't yet possess the ability to understand basic math (it's hard to teach it to someone who DOES understand basic math!).

    I think the best age, personally, is someplace in upper middle school - around grade 7 or 8. Once you've got algebra, functions and expressions make logical sense. Proofs - geometry and others - make a great corrolary to code. You're given a set of known commands and asked to solve a larger problem.

    So, anyway. Right before geometry, and continuing through it, probably would be the best time.
    • It's impossible to explain memory allocation to someone who doesn't yet possess the ability to understand basic math (it's hard to teach it to someone who DOES understand basic math!).

      I used legos to teach memory allocation to 4th graders, and I'm pretty sure the same method would work with younger kids. Pretty easy to have a heap of legos, and "allocate" certain block sizes to different building projects, which is no different than basic memory allocation (including the importance of "releasing" ownership of a block so that somebody else can use it). I'm always amazed at the math majors who think that without higher math, higher math concepts can't be explained in concrete terms.
    • Before I saw my 13th birthday I recieved a full education in military history, mathematics, and the practical application of militar hadware and tactics. I applied my education in the effort to totaly blow the crap out of an alien race that we were currently at war with. Take it from me it's never to early to start. PS: If you haven't read the book ENGERS GAME don't mod me down, you're just not in on the joke.
    • Do you think it is the development that gets involved here, or/and experience? To take another example, it is hard to learn philosophy before you reach certain level of thought abstraction, AND experience certain life situations.

      Suppose we pick tasks that are not beyond people's development levels, such as riding a skateboard, or programming a goto operation :-) What then happens to speed of learning vs. age?

    • Though there are animals that can learn very basic linguistic abilities, though they are able to do many things that *look* like language, no chimpanzee, gorilla, or other (dolphins, etc) has ever been shown to actually use language.

      I'm not sure which definition of language you're using -- spoken communication or communicating ideas and concepts through any means -- but Koko the gorilla [koko.org] is just one example of animals other than humans using language. You can easily find more by searching the Web.

      • Koko isn't capable of using language.

        Koko is capable of using pseudo-language. Real language is generative and recombinatorial.

        Koko and other gorillas/chimps/bonobos can do things like "me me food me me me food", "banana give banana give banana me banana" or identify symbols that stand for people or objects. Some can count (see Alex the parrot, very cool stuff). But none actually use a real language.

        I feel somewhat justified to answer *this* question as I do research on animal cognition.
        • Koko is capable of saying that she misses Michael, her old boyfriend, that she loves her kitten, and that she wants to have a baby... She obviously isn't using proper grammar, but that's language IMO.
          • How is Koko capable of saying anything without using anything close to proper grammar? Even based on the loosest analysis, she's capable of showing some language-type signs that people rework into the thoughts they think she's having. I think a far more strict and fair analysis would be that Koko is capable of a) repeating known signs that are viewed as rewarding, b) matching signs to her behavioral state, and c) noticing associations between signs based on the context in which they are presented.

            There ar
    • Studies have shown that after the age of about 14 your "plasticity" for new languages drops radically. A new language is stored in physically different locations of your brain when acquired late in life. This is a serious limitation, but it is not impossible to beat. My mother learned spanish in her 30's to get her BCLAD and now speaks it so well that native speakers ask her what part of south america shes from. Its also the reason the american education system is *screwed* as the first time I saw a for
    • I found it EXTREMELY hard to learn programming before algebra (though I tried). Basic (6th grade) math needs to be there before the functions can really be taught.
    • I learned to program BASIC at age 5, before I could even write [my handwriting still looks horrible to this day]. I think in BASIC. I knew algebra before I knew multiplication, because I had examined and broke apart alot of code. I learned to program with a few breif syntaxes given to me [PRINT & INPUT] and alot of going through source code of the old Apple //C included games/apps/etc (they were open source, interpreted, not compiled)
      • I just posted this too. I was using windows 1.0 from the age of 4, before I could even read properly....used to just click and click till i found stuff etc, and then learnt what things said by myself. I'd make pixel art in paint too........

        At 5/6 I started basic programming. Woo.

        And yes, my handwriting sucks.
        • You know, at 6 I learned "CATALOG" (it was an Apple II - I loved it when I learned that ProDOS could take "CAT" instead), and then I decided to learn BASIC (not much, though). My handwriting is illegible. So, new Ask /.: Who here has bad handwriting, and who learned programming early in life?

  • it helps to be able to read... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by yorgasor ( 109984 ) <ron@tr[ ]chs.net ['ite' in gap]> on Monday January 24, 2005 @07:33PM (#11462488) Homepage
    I've got a couple of small children. The 4.5 year old can get around pretty well, knows some programs work in windows and some in linux and can boot into whichever one she wants. She can also recognize the icons and start whatever game or explore the system menu and bring up other games and applications. What she can't do is read.

    Sure, she's learning. She enjoys sounding out various words and spelling them. But she's gonna have a pretty difficult time writing programs and debugging code until she can read and understand various error messages. I think about the earliest you can expect learning to code to be productive is around 7 years old.
    • It's helpful to establish some necessary skills or development levels. Suppose those are in place: we have people who know how to read. At what age, though, would their learning to program be the fastest? It is conventionally thought that young people learn faster, but I question this assumption.
    • I learned to program at 6. Of course, that was when home computeres booted into BASIC, so it was much more *there*. I sometimes wonder how the next generation of hackers will grow up and if programming is only going to be something you learn in school.
      • I agree. When i started, it was just plonked in front of me. Basic was just 'there'... everything was so low level... itd just be 'there'... so id play... and there'd be no paranoid parents worrying you'd do something totally wrong.

        Now I fear that there isn't so much of this. nothing is a sandbox, and for a kid to really learn programming now, they have to open up visual basic or what not. It's certainly not the way it used to be and i think it's kinda sad.

        Meh.
      • One could argue that I am a member of that generation......... Although I did self-teach myself some BASIC variants at age 8, which I suppose disqualifies me from making any comments on this....... Although it does seem to me that my peers who merely learn computers as a High-School class are about as clued as, say, the below-average AOL user, since they can almost string together two functions together in the same program. Only one thing worse then these, though, are the Web Design students. Frontpage 5.0
  • IANAL (I am not a linguist) but I'd say it would make sense that people learn differently at different times in their life. Perhaps in the early stage of life, thre is not much information to base learning on, so it is simply absorbed and retained in a certain way. On the other hand, later in life people can learn by methods since they have a ton of information to base their experiences on and also have had practice with different learning techniques.
    • Wouldn such qualitative differences make older people learn faster, then?
    • It's true with time each one of us learn enought about ourselves to use the right techniques. We also have a good base to learn more and more complicated stuff. But we can't forget that children in primary school use a lot of thier energy for that: school. Once in highschool they use some of that energy for sex, and since I would say that keeps going on during life, maybe I would say while bing really young is that we learn more and better.

  • Feh! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (reggoh.gip)> on Monday January 24, 2005 @07:36PM (#11462514) Journal
    It's easier to learn when you are GENUINELY interested in something, down to the guts.

    I'm past 40 and whenever it's about what interests me the most, I have no problem learning new stuff.

    • "I'm past 40 and whenever it's about what interests me the most, I have no problem learning new stuff."

      Yes, but when we were 10, we learned everything - whether we were interested in it or not. Bet you have some pop music floating around in your head that you'd just as soon forget, eh?

      A.
      (who has some of that pop music in his own head)
      • Well, I know some kids who got adopted after 10 and forgot their (former native) LANGUAGE. A lot of it, at least. Some pop songs they still remember, though, I am sure :-) Memory is a tricky thing. Not to mess with it, let's suppose we just look at "local" learning - whatever is learned and used here and now. Do you think ten year olds memorize songs faster than people at other ages? I watched a play "Fiddler on the roof" this weekend, and the actors afterwards said they rehearsed it only for two weeks. Wow
        • Just look at Canada, which does a good job at making sure french people forget the french language if they live outside Québec for a few years...
    • How would you compare the speed of your learning at different ages? Do you learn faster now, or did you learn faster at some other age?
    • There's considereable evidence to indicate that the more you have learnt the easier it is to learn new things. The reason for this is that you know more things you can relate new concepts to, and learning things is mostly a process of establishing relationships between old and new knowledge.

      Coupled with that, if you exercise your brain by learning new things it gets easier to learn new things too. Research has also indicated that people with active brains are less likely to suffer from degenerative brain

  • Training (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SilverspurG ( 844751 )
    I think it's more fair to ask at what ages are we more easily trained. We learn skills, repetitive routines, and hopefully creative ways to apply those routines when we're younger. The notion of routine and application aren't quite so tedious then because it's all new. As we get older we start to generate interests past the simple routines and our horizons broaden. As a chemist, I'm wonderfully interested in the application of programming and "what can I do?" but I'm no longer so interested in programmi
    • This is a comment on the state of education as it is practiced in some institutions. I'd like to note that not all kids learn the basis of mathematics by repeating 50-60 simple problems :-) Complex problem solving is possible at different ages and on different levels.

      But let us suppose we don't go into these issues, and restrict ourselves to training as such, to skills. Adults learn skills, too, sometimes. At what age is training the fastest?

  • Not so much a specific age group (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ra5pu7in ( 603513 ) <ra5pu7in@gm a i l . com> on Monday January 24, 2005 @07:42PM (#11462607) Journal
    I don't have research data or any such thing, but I'm not so sure this is age-group specific. There seems to be a cluster of people who cannot learn even the most simple, intuitive things on a computer. Obviously, no matter their age, computing is beyond them. Others seem to have a natural grasp for the basic concepts - the logic and mathematics and structure - that makes it easier to learn a new computer language. Being older may make it harder to shift to a completely different style of programming language - say from DOS to LISP. But, given a certain level of skills and inherent talent, any age group could learn a new programming language.

    The more important factors are desire and motivation. Learning a new language just because some management-level hack thinks it will be the next great thing(tm) could make any age-group lag behind. Learning a new language because it resolves a lot of the issues and difficulties encountered in an already known language or because it is necessary for the project one wishes to work on makes age irrelevant.
    • Learning a new language because it resolves a lot of the issues and difficulties encountered in an already known language or because it is necessary for the project one wishes to work on makes age irrelevant Obviously, you CAN learn new languages at any age over seven or so. But is age irrelevant? Does the ability to learn languages depend on age as a variable?
      • Let me clarify one thing - I place computer languages in a completely different realm than a spoken language. Studies have shown that a spoken language actually uses a distinct section of the brain. Learning to speak fluently in a second language takes the ability to build up a new section for that. (Two examples of this: 1) ask me a question in English when I am talking to someone in Spanish - I will probably answer in Spanish without realizing I have done so. 2) ask me whether I just watched an entir
  • The studies there have been on say, language aquisition show that adults learn languages *faster* than children (if you teach them properly)- except for accent.

    Basically adults have more places to fit new knowledge into. Children have to learn everything from scratch, which is a bit harder. However children haven't already learnt a particular way to move their mouth, throat and tongue; so they learn accent very well. Adults have already learnt a different way to move them, and relearning this is harder.

    • There was an interesting article published recently in the New Scientist magazine in the UK ( http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524 814.900 [newscientist.com] - unfortunately only a preview). which talks about a lot of work going on about hyperglots (people who are able to speak 6 languages or more) and about the facility for language being stronger in some people than in others. The facility didn't appear to be age dependent either. I still think there's something in what you say, though.

      I think that reducin

      • What you are saying is that learning is irreducibly complex. Then my question can be more meaningfully rephrased as, "Is age a contributing factor to the complexity of learning?"

        Thank you for the article. The hyperglots I new personally said that it is a big experience to learn your second language, and still big and different experience to learn the third language, and then it "gets easy." It strangely reminded me of what mothers of many kids say. One kid turns your life upside-down (like first language a
    • Basically adults have more places to fit new knowledge into. Children have to learn everything from scratch, which is a bit harder.

      I see this also in the way that adults have more ways where they can apply the knowledge, so they understand why the new knowledge is useful and interesting. I'm a math/science teacher in a junior high school, and I'm constantly faced by the question "Where do we need this?"

      • It makes sense: the differences in having or not having a reason to learn are quite important here. Adults tend to learn for a particular reason; children often learn, let's face it, for no particular reason other than some political curriculum decision. It is interesting in this regard to look at learning of more self-directed homeschoolers.

  • Really? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @07:58PM (#11462803) Journal
    There is surprisingly little research on post-early-childhood development.

    Really? I'm sure that nobody has studied "the best time to learn a computer language", but if you've done a real survey of the literature, I'm sure you can synthesize your own answer superior to pretty much anything you can read here.

    My own conjecture is that "developer ability" (the ability to construct your own abstractions, and use others effectively) as opposed to mere "coder abilitity" (the ability to make code "do this" and "do that") is probably almost directly correlated to mathematical ability, both in the K-12 and upper-level-college senses of the term. In fact I suspect there would be an almost direct parallel between the "numerical manipulation" skills that constitutes most math in a K-12 education, and the ability to do math at a Mathematician's level. To use the somewhat-out-of-date-but-still-useful Piaget naming, "concrete operational" vs. "formal operational".

    I'm not saying the two are identical, just that the cognitive skillsets are so similar that the development literature for math is likely to apply quite directly to coding. Trying to teach an average six-year-old "Object Orientation" is probably too much abstraction for them; they may learn to manipulate pre-existing objects but I'd bet that until they become "formal operational" they will have a hard time creating good objects of their own.

    OO here is just an example; functional, for instance, I'd expect to be even harder to really grasp in the general case. You could teach simple map and filter, but they aren't going to get the full richness. Again, on average.

    So this is a meta-answer: I don't know the answer to your question, and 99 out of 100 people posting won't either. But I can refer you to the literature on learning math and guess that it is as likely to apply as anything, with the mapping I've given you here. I can't be sure, but it's a good guess. And I'm pretty there's been a lot of study on that topic.

    (People rushing to reply to this are encouraged to be sure they understand the meaning of "concrete" and "formal operational", and the meaning of the word "average". If so, fire away, but I'm sick of people mentally editing qualifiers like "average" or "most" out of my messages and then firing with all cannons as if they weren't there, and if you don't know those Piaget terms you don't really know what I said here.)

    (And while I've defined the terminology, I'm going to point out a lot of people who think they are "developers" are in fact "coders", at least as evidenced by the source code I've seen both in closed and open source projects. Few people seem capable of creating decent abstractions.)
    • DESPITE my above answer- I completely agree. *ABSTRACT* programming requires higher math and/or a heck of a lot of philosophy and logic. *Concrete* programming, and even how higher concepts such as memory allocation and object orientation pertains to concrete programming, can be done by even very young children.

      For a concrete way to teach object orientation, I suggest a turtle graphics engine, in a Lisp-like extensible language. Logo used to be ideal for this- anybody know where I can get a hold of a de
    • I've been working with frameworks using Piaget and social constructivist ideas together, such as enactivism. While children can't do "piagetian-sense abstraction" (formal operational, say) until later, there is surprisingly much they can do within familiar contexts, or while co-creating knowledge with adult helpers. Ideas such as "situated abstraction" explain part of it. Literature on adults learning math that I have seen so far was not developmental or even age-comparative, least of all comparing adults t

  • Not 50+, that's for sure. (Score:3, Funny)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Monday January 24, 2005 @08:08PM (#11462896)
    Now where did they put that Submit button....
    • Age? Doesn't matter. Compare a stupid kid game (Pokemymom/Yu-get-it-on) and kids understand it. Understanding (for most people) works best when it is based on an interest, like kids and retarded fads. If I thought 3d Animation was dumb, I'd be failing college. Tell a kid C++, Java, or VB will bring them toys/garbage, they will learn, oh yes, they will learn. Now if programming attracted female supermodels, my college expirience may have been after a different carreer.
  • I began Actionscript in 6th grade, and mastered most of it during the summer. I learned that you really didn't need much math for it. But, for things that I'm doing now, like Php and C++, you need to have things like Algebra understood.
  • I learned basic programming back in the mid 80's. I learned Pascal in the early 90's in college. I learned Java 3 years ago when going back for my master's degree. I'm also a teacher who has had lots of classes in human development. I believe any kid can learn basic programming. Any kid who really gets into it could really make some great programs. It isn't until an adolescent develops more abstract thinking that they fully understand all the nuances of programming. I'm sure I'll get blasted by all t
    • Suppose a person reaches the needed capacity to do upper level math at some age, say 15 or 20. Will the ability to learn programming change with further aging?
      • I believe (if I remember my human development properly), that once they cross that concrete to abstract threshold, the ability to program in the abstract is there. Wheather that improves with age is a good question. It has been my personal experience that as an adult I am more diciplined about learning programming, yet at the same time, I do not have the vast amounts of free time to dedicate to it like a teen might.
        • This issue of "free time" complicates the matter very much. Most people see my question in terms of "year time". Given two years, the teenager will make more progress than an adult. You formulated the difference: the teenager has more free time to devote to this learning. I am trying to shift focus "from years to hours". At what age would people need more man-hours to learn?
          • Given two individuals, one in their 30's or 40's, and the other in their late teens. Assume both have the same capacity for abstract thinking. Lock them both in a room for one week with all the necessities, throw in a computer and a programming textbook. I think both would progress at about the same pace. At this point, I think the only difference would be their past expirences, of which the adult is likely to have more. I personally feel that under these cercumstances, I would have an advantage over t
    • I believe any kid can learn basic programming. Any kid who really gets into it could really make some great programs. It isn't until an adolescent develops more abstract thinking that they fully understand all the nuances of programming

      It depends really...I'm 15 now, I started when I was 7 (8086 ASM, then BASIC, C++, C, etc. etc) I understand a fair amount of the abstract stuff, and I can do it in my head.

      But there are some skills that can't be developed that easily, mostly in the implementation part. F
  • I barely passed high school, now, 14 years later, I am a junior in college, with a 4.0 GPA.
  • Personally I started learning HTML in about 5th or 6th grade. I could do some BASIC coding as well. But even at the top of my classes in math and science, I'll admit learning C structure at 10 was much more difficult than when I tried again at around 14 with algebra and geometry under my belt. Anything I suppose could be taught to anyone. But do you all remember struggling with Times tables in 3rd grade? It's challenging to do rudimentary programming without at least addition, subtraction and multi

  • Motivation! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ladybugfi ( 110420 )
    >From informal observations in graduate schools, I've concluded that older people learn faster because of their experience in learning techniques, which seems so counterintuitive!

    Aiming for a PhD after a score of years in corporate environment, I agree. It is somewhat easier to learn when you have real life experience to which you can attach the book knowledge.

    But let's also not forget a major factor: MOTIVATION. Teens and even college kids don't necessarily have a clear motivation to learn, older peop
    • The clarity of goals seems to change with age. Understanding and formulating and delineating what you want is a big learning task. It seems to me that older people tend to be better at this task.
  • Clearly you drill down to a different question entirely. The question of what age is it easiest to learn changes dramatically whether you are talking social etiquette, computer code or hide-and-[go-]seek.

    I imagine it varies [for computer coding] according to the specific persons development. Also are you talking about coding effectively in a commercial environment (where social skills are vital) or lone-coding in your bedroom/study. Vastly different environments ... as I am now learning!

    For me, I peaked a
  • I think the more you know it is easier to learn more. What you already know gives you a foundation to build on. If you don't have that foundation, you have to build it before learning more.
  • I don't see how this could be properly studied. I find it much more difficult to remember and learn things as I've aged. I suspect it could be from age, but it could just as easily be from the fact that I'm not focused on learning now that I am out of school.
  • I learned Russian at the age of 40+, having many years earlier wrongly concluded that I had no talent for language learning. What changed? Nothing much, I just developed an interest after visiting the country, which resulted in a higher level of motivation. Motivation is everything.

    Music is another example. I plateaued my piano learning at the age of about 12, then gave up altogether (bad teacher too, but my own lack of motivation was a huge part). Then, at the age of 42, I discovered the violin. I'v
  • There are certain aspects of programming that programmers of ALL age simply do not get.

    Use of Exceptions in C++ as they were intended is the biggest. I've yet to meet anyone except the guys who write the books, who uses them properly. Even many web sites and tutorials that explain exceptions do it wrongly.

    This is next followed by the use of virtual functions correctly, as laid out in the C++ FAQs book. Programmers I run into tinker with virtual functions without really making the jump to basing their code

    • Use of Exceptions in C++ as they were intended is the biggest. I've yet to meet anyone except the guys who write the books, who uses them properly. Even many web sites and tutorials that explain exceptions do it wrongly.

      This is next followed by the use of virtual functions correctly, as laid out in the C++ FAQs book. Programmers I run into tinker with virtual functions without really making the jump to basing their code around the entire idea of reusable, replaceable components.

      Could you possibly go into

      • Are all of your dynamically allocated resources released if an exception is thrown? Are you sure you are looking everywhere it can be thrown? ...constructors, passed argument variables, wierd autoptr like things, inside collections?

        I like C++ a lot but exception handling without a finally block or automatic garbage collection is immensely difficult.
        • Yeah, I know what ya mean...you could always make a cleanup function as a pure virtual function of the base class, and give all the pointers declared in-function to the exception class, and clean them up in the catch block (still messy, and hogs memory).

          GCC supports nested functions (i think), would that make it any easier? I've never used it (maybe it was some weird dream, I've had a few), but could you could just free all the allocated memory inside the dunction in a nested cleanup function, called at th

  • cognitive ability declines with age (Score:3, Informative)

    by beliavsky ( 814870 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @01:21PM (#11481745)
    Quoting the site http://www.infoaging.org/b-neuro-1-what.html , whose findings agree with other material I have read:

    "Most studies show that, in general, cognitive abilities are the greatest when people are in their 30s and 40s. Cognitive abilities stay about the same until the late 50s or early 60s, at which point they begin to decline, but to only a small degree. The effects of cognitive changes are usually not noticed until the 70s and beyond."

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