Cynic hat on . . . I'm not sure I get this. Looks like an effort to promote an illustrator more than actually achieve the stated aims.
The reasoning is simple: Alan Kay and others have repeatedly demonstrated kids have a far greater aptitude for this stuff than is generally accepted. The packaging in this manner isn't the problem, the problem is the programming environments around today don't tend to do anything the kids are interested in without overcoming significant hurdles. i.e. unless you can do graphics easily forget it.
Back when I grew up in the 80s every 8 year old had to do Logo at school, partly to teach maths, partly to teach programming constructs. This was the part of the week almost everyone liked most. Make pictures, do maths, play with robots - what's not to love?
So, hope that theory is wrong, but it sets off too many alarms for now.
I got to know Linda in business school in 2005. I worked on a big group assignment with her for a year. She's got this natural joy about her that if feel she can inpire anyone about anything.
She founded Rails Girls in 2010 and joined Code Academy a few years ago so she has way more experience introducing people to programming than she does on doing illustrations.
I believe getting people inspired is the best way to get them to learn. My two cents is that she was inspired by _why's work and tries take that approach further.
>So, hope that theory is wrong, but it sets off too many alarms for now.
Yes. The the alarms bells are far too numerous when the co-founder of Rails Girls ("Our aim is to give tools and a community for women to understand technology and to build their ideas."), and community manager at Codeacademy expands her mission of education and inspiration to children via a book tailored to them.
Alarm bells everywhere.
Thankfully, you've caught the issues and rang the (many) alarms before the book has even been written. Very efficient.
Considering there are quite some illustrated books about programming, especially "why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby", the whole thing doesn't seem to hurt either.
Kids have different tastes, like everyone. So why not an illustrated guide? It does not necessarily "fix" a problem, but provide a wider range of material. Not everything has to be code.
Linda has credibility when it comes to teaching code, so I would not put myself above that.
Many people, myself included, cut their teeth on machines where graphics were far from easy. Most of my early programs on the VIC20 and C64 were text adventures, and occasionaly I'd get into some games where the graphics were as exciting as moving asterisks.
Yeah, but as others observe this is a moving target. What impressed you and me in the 80s is not going to motivate a child that grew up playing on an iPad.
The art here is in finding the set of virtual objects needed for the desired result, ideally about which there is some existing intuition for reasoning about. In Mindstorms they have a good term for this that I've forgotten, of which the turtle is the object used to teach ideas of geometry, subroutines etc.
Thats true, but my son has enjoyed typing in "moving asterisk" games from an old VIC20 book into an emulator, and has enjoyed playing them too. He would still rather play on an iPad though. Oh well.
I too first really started with Logo. I tried teaching Scheme twice to 7-yr-olds, and found they readily picked up the concepts. But they seem more excited with things like Scratch, since you can get sounds and things jumping around and responding in a very easy manner. Logo is just not as impressive now as it was decades ago.
The issue is grownups who don't have a logical mindset for program is the ones who design curriculum and not an under estimation of children's abilities. It would be really interesting to have a pre-school that teaches these concepts first:
breaking down one big problem to smaller problems
sequencing beyond 1, 2, 3 but in problem solving
logical thinking / prediction
This would likely be a very good indoctrination of programming via narrative for kids between 4-8, specifically 4-6. For kids that age, this takes something real and presents it as a magical force exerted on the world which can bring order and control. Kids that small are very intelligent and will get, much more, an emotional kindling for programming from a book like this...
I'd take more issue with the obvious branding. It would have been more elegant if the penguin and robot had more generic renderings.
I don't think that reasoning is simple: I don't agree that what you assert has actually been demonstrated. There is no agreed-upon way in which you can teach kids programming. Otherwise: citation needed.
Looks like an effort to promote an illustrator more [..]
How about being a bit more generous as to someone's motives? Why not "achieving the stated aims, with the added benefit if promoting an illustrator?". Suppose I like painting and birdwatching. Now I do a kickstarter for a birdwatcher's guide with paintings of birds. I'm honestly excited about birdwatching and believe a book with painted birds will make it more enjoyable for many people. As I happen to paint myself and I think my quirky way of painting birds will add to the enjoyment, I decide to do the paintings myself. Am I promoting my own paintings? Of course! Is my motivation otherwise completely honest? Of course!
That's Alan Kay of Smalltalk/PARC fame. His OOPSLA talk is the other classic, worth it for his opening jokes about Dijkstra.
The fact that so much of our modern computing environment stems from the work of a molecular biologist trying to teach children to program is lost on many. He's truly a visionary, sometimes wrong, but always at least interesting.
EDIT: Haven't been able to find a proper clip of it, but the really relevant part to this is that back in the 70s at PARC they used to teach Smalltalk to kids, and the apps they'd produce were seriously non-trivial. Things like electronics schematics editors (you can see part of this in passing during the OOPSLA video) were implemented by children. This still blows my mind.
Presentation and the packaging matter. It really matters to programming right now because of the image problem it has for the masses: "it's a well paid janitorial occupation for socially inept, nerdy looking males". Anything that helps break that perception helps.
From my experience (as a former 8 year old who had to do logo), this could be a great way to get kids to think of programming/computers as something they should learn more about.
Most 8 year olds are looking at logo (or whatever) and being turned off from it.
The reasoning is simple: Alan Kay and others have repeatedly demonstrated kids have a far greater aptitude for this stuff than is generally accepted. The packaging in this manner isn't the problem, the problem is the programming environments around today don't tend to do anything the kids are interested in without overcoming significant hurdles. i.e. unless you can do graphics easily forget it.
Back when I grew up in the 80s every 8 year old had to do Logo at school, partly to teach maths, partly to teach programming constructs. This was the part of the week almost everyone liked most. Make pictures, do maths, play with robots - what's not to love?
So, hope that theory is wrong, but it sets off too many alarms for now.