Ask Slashdot: Do Kids Still Take Interest In Programming For Its Own Sake? 276
nirgle writes "I have been wondering lately if there are any kids interested in programming for its own sake anymore. When I was my nephew's age, computers were still fascinating: There wasn't a laptop on every table, facebook wasn't splattered on every screen, and you couldn't get any question answered in just a couple seconds with Google. When I was 10, I would have done anything for a close programming mentor instead of the 5-foot high stack of books that I had to read cover-to-cover on my own. So I was happy when my nephew started asking about learning to do what "Uncle Jay does." Does the responsibility now shift to us to kindle early fires in computer science, or is programming now just another profession for the educational system to manage?"
Another reader pointed out a related post on the Invent with Python blog titled "Nobody wants to learn how to program."
Kids have little context (Score:5, Informative)
We had a 14 year old work experience lad, who was the nephew of one of the owners of the business, and he wanted to become an app developer - when we chatted about this further, it turned out that his claimed "programming experience" amounted to using the drag-and-drop style of online website wizards, and using apps from the iTunes store.
He had a goal in mind, and he was raring to go, so we decided to embrace this enthusiasm and run with it - so we decided that the best thing for him to do during the two weeks with us was to design and build a basic app - he was thrilled by this. We gave him a task for two hours on the first morning, which was to research the apps out there and decide what was best to build (building a copy of something out there is easier for this sort of thing than coming up with the concept itself).
He came back with "I want to build World of Warcraft". Crap.
We eventually scaled him back to building a HTML5 version of tic-tac-toe, as the logic is simple, the graphics are simple, and the HTML experience travels well. He was given a lot of personal tutorials from myself and the other developers for the first two days, basically a beginners guide to HTML, and then told to see if he could come up with a basic page with a table in which would hold the game board - no styling, no JavaScript, just a basic page with a table.
Despite help from us developers being on tap (we encouraged questions, we discouraged "do it for me" - examples are fine so long as work and understanding was needed to translate the code into what he was doing, so a simple copy and paste wouldn't solve the set issue), by the end of the first day he hadn't grasped the concept of nested elements to build the table. What he came up with even IE barfed over.
The poor kid had no grasp for it at all. I hope it was a failure on our part rather than inability, but really it was inability. He never realised software development was so difficult, no realisation as to what was actually involved in the process or the building itself. He saw pretty things and thought they were simple to produce.
So, anyone who gets the chance to introduce a child to software development, please take it nice and slow and be prepared for lots of failures, lots of frustration and lots of patience.
By the end of the two weeks he was proclaiming he wanted to be a farmer. And now, I hear, he wants to hire out construction equipment (after he was given a day of work experience on a farm).
Re:Programming for programmings "own sake" (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure if you are joking (I'm guessing you are), but pro tip - only mod down items that contribute nothing to a discussion like trolls or flamebait. I've been using the site for over a decade and I've probably modded down five or six people over that course.
Mod up the arguments that speak for you and contribute something. If someone says something that you dislike, look for a counter argument and mod that up.
Lately, I've been seeing a lot of well thought comments modded down (check any smartphone discussion) for disagreeing with the groupthink. This is like group censorship which is never a good thing for any community.