Strange Loop Conference
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2019–2026
52:09 · 34K views · Sep 14, 2019
Felienne Hermans's Strange Loop keynote on the history and pedagogy of teaching programming. She questions exploration-only approaches like Logo and discusses research supporting explicit instruction and rote practice.
Cited in threads about teaching kids and beginners to code as research-based evidence that explicit instruction beats pure discovery.
9 comments from Hacker News
Also, I attended Strange Loop conference last September and there was a keynote speaker who discussed effective ways of teaching programming to kids. The talk is on YouTube and I gotta say, it's very insightful. "How to teach programming (and other things)?" by Felienne Hermans Link: this video
There's a StrangeLoop talk about teaching programming by Felienne Hermans ( this video ) that claims that all fields have an "exploration vs instruction" debate on how to teach their field, but this debate is apparently absent from the field of programming for the most part, wherein the "mess around and figure it out" exploration style of LOGO and Papert ("every time you teach something, you deprive a [student] of the pleasure and benefit of discovery") is the predominant unquestioned wisdom. Felienne wants more pedagogy fights. It's a worthwhile talk. I love LOGO and I think our generation of programmers are very sympathetic Papert's philosophy due to most of us being self-taught to some degree (you can see the fond nostalgia already on display in the comments here), but Felienne made me think about it more critically.
According to this person there is plenty of research saying you should tell them how to do it this video I think she makes a good point. We don't hand people a guitar and say "figure it out on your own". Cooking shows don't generally show the final dish and say "if you want to make this yourself figure it out on your own". You might say computer programming is different but I suspect for most people here you were taught things like sorting algorithms, database queries, lexers and parsing algorithms, etc. You were not made to figure them on your own. Sure maybe you were self motivated and looked up the topics by yourself but likely you mostly learned by looking at existing code and over time figured out how to see what it was doing and how to modify it or apply the same ideas.
I'm struggling to parse "essentially motivationally self-taught" but if you mean to say something like "only self-taught programmers will successfully learn to program" that's a myth that isn't backed up by the evidence and serves to exclude people from programming. This talk addresses that misconception: this video The paper discusses "constructionism" (which, loosely put, is the idea you give someone a toy and let them figure it out): [LINK] There is more out there but that's all I have time to find right now.
I was self directed as apparently are many software engineers so I've always assumed that the best way to teach would be to let kids direct themselves and they can ask questions if they get stuck. Well, this video claims I'm wrong. Self directed study doesn't fit most students according to the research presented in the video. this video you can jump to 11:00 if you want to jump to the part about learning.