Comments on: 170 research papers about teaching programming, summarised

By: Jane

Jane — Mon, 08 Aug 2022 10:04:14 +0000

In reply to Nancy. You are very welcome Nancy! Great to hear you are doing research in CS Ed!!!

By: Nancy

Nancy — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 11:49:40 +0000

Hi Jane,
Thank you for the research report, I found it very helpful! I am currently conducting a research on online programming courses, so I come cross and find your report! One thing for sure, even after your complete programming courses with full marks, one still can’t immediately become a good programmer at any software firms, you need on-job training and lot of screentime, experience is built up little by little.
The following quote come to my mind:
“Your only limit is your soul. What I say is true—anyone can cook … but only the fearless can be great.” –Chef Gusteau, Ratatouille.
We are here to teach anyone to code… but not everyone will be a great developer.
Again, thank you for the report!
Greetings from Cape Town, South Africa.
Nancy

By: Jane Waite

Jane Waite — Tue, 19 Apr 2022 14:48:30 +0000

Many thanks for your response to our blog about the programming pedagogy report.
As a developer who worked in industry, in banks, and in other large institutions for 20 years, before becoming a teacher and then a researcher, I personally very much understand your frustration with the issue of how we create a pipeline of effective developers.

It’s great to hear that you are so actively involved in addressing this issue with all your work on teaching programming.

The pedagogy report is a synthesis of research in the field of computer science education and this research is still developing.

Teaching programming is hard. The research in the field provides some ideas about how to help educators make it less hard. But we still have much research to do and we are investing much time and effort in supporting this through our work at the Raspberry Pi Computing Education Research Centre.

By: Daniel Donaldson

Daniel Donaldson — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 12:38:36 +0000

As someone who has been actively involved in teaching coding, to a wide variety of non-traditional learners of programming, including bootcamps of my own foundation, teaching coding to low-opportunity youth in S.E. Asia, as well as in the US and Canada; as someone who is currently involved in the development of a game-creation tech-skills program in Cambodia – my own initiative, and working with the IT Association for this country; and as someone who has decades of experience as a lead developer, as founder of several tech startups – I read this report and can only marvel of its completely useless nature.
You are asking none of the questions that need to be asked, and accepting terrible assumptions to start with. I am very familiar with how the anxieties of the IT industry manifest themselves, as it still finds itself in a weak bargaining position vis-a-vis coding, a crucial form of unobtanium that entirely breaks the assumption of asymmetrical leverage held by corporations over workers, after decades of expectation that a manufactured glut of programmers would restore the preferred balance.
This anxiety always manages to manifest itself in the minds and words of those whose imagination of the professionalization of education creates exactly the methods and obstacles to effective code-learning. The agreement around who should learn to code, what coding is, and indeed the essential nature of coding is summarized in your statement regarding teaching techniques: “you use many teaching techniques, and their application in teaching coding is unproblematic.” [paraphrasing].
No, you are wrong. it’s entirely problematic, and what you are laying out is a first step for legions whose skills will never rise to the level of market leverage: at best, you’re focused on developing the skills that managers of those who code employ: a cursory understanding, an inflated sense of capability, and a disregard for what makes coding what it is, in the current stage of technical development. This has been tried, so many times, and there were other ineffective attempts to survey and reduce the fundamentally problematic nature of coding by similarly academically constrained writers. They failed, as is witnessed by the continued economically distinct position of the coder: considered an engineer, but with no need whatever for certification: only the ability to execute, and to realize and express the abstractions of large social, economic and financial movements, before they’re described elsewhere. Like all translations, these are only valuable in their nuance, not their literalness, and what you describe is a world of code without nuance: in other words, a waste.