aretae comments on Being a teacher - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Swimmer963 14 March 2011 08:03PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 March 2011 12:42:06AM 8 points [-]

Learned to program at five. If someone has the programming gear, five is a perfectly good time to teach them to program. Just show them some Python code (I was reading BASIC, bleah) and see if they can deduce the rules and try writing their own. If someone is meant to be a programmer then a programmer they shall be.

Comment author: aretae 17 March 2011 09:22:41PM 0 points [-]

I was slow...and I didn't have a computer to program on until 8.
On the other hand, I've been teaching for ~20 years, and I've been teaching programming for half that. Learning to iterate through a collection of data structures is the killer feature in programming. Some folks get it....and immediately. Most folks who are not naturals take a lot longer to understand the concept...and most classes jump over it like it's easy. Usually 3-10 different explanations, and 5-20 examples will get folks over the hump.