I absolutely agree with Nikos' approach to teaching programming young learners without using an actual code. If we teach kids the idea of programming early - it will then be much more intuitive for them to pick up the language formalities later. Because by that time, such a fundamental question as "why" is already answered in practice.
In other words, the time for a real language comes as an actual need that has been experienced in practice and doing. And that makes all the difference in understanding what you need and why.
It's all over the web that more and more parents and teachers come to appreciate the idea of teaching kids to code. But the problem is that they don't know where to even begin or what tools to use. As a result, kids looking to learn programming today are faced with two main extremes:
(1) storytelling, game dev, and animation programs; and
(2) real-world languages or tools based on IDEs;
Programs in the first category are all fine, except for cases when the app is too compute-intensive, or 3D objects are clumsy or rough-looking (but these problems are just temporary).
But those using real-world IDEs to introduce programming are effectively training young pilots on real fighter jets. Such tools seem too complex and intimidating even for experienced computer users. What they really ought to be using is a "flight simulator", but currently there are too few tools that allow to do that and all pretty limited.
Even when we have something that useful it makes absolute sense to use physical games in the gym to introduce the notion of composing instructions for something/someone else (a parent-robot in Nikos' case :)
Nikos, thanks for sharing your work, and congrats on joining Knewton!
Hope you don't mind me including a link to videos of your class once again:
I'm familiar with Scratch as an element of the first category; what other (meta-)programs do you recommend?
I learned some HyperCard and some Basic as a kid, but didn't get hooked until i could do useful things with shell scripting in college, which is definitely a case for category 2, or perhaps something even simpler: programs written in a plain text editor or even just on the command line itself.
The power to do things that matter is typically more motivating to girls than to boys, who will do something just because it's there (ie, why boys tend to play more video games and more girls end up in teaching and social-justice work).
Just trying to provide another perspective. :)
I'm really happy that my class has gotten all of you excited about this and thank you all for your great comments. You guys have inspired me to keep going. I'm planning more classes with more advanced topics. Whenever I have something fresh I post it on my facebook page www.facebook.com/drtechniko. I would love for you guys to get the conversation going on there as well.
The whole class was about an hour. However, I spent about 20 minutes or so playing a different game which would get the kids excited about robots. I showed them some robots that exist today from current research and I actually had a little robot I made, which started walking when you clap. This way I introduced them the concept of a "brain" or computer residing inside the robot so that it would do stuff if you gave it the right instructions.
