Re: Teaching The New Generation

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Going the extra step, here's a few topical links (in no particular order) found using Search Search to find nodes containing the words "teach teaching:"

• Junior Perl
• Re: Re: Perl quests .. programming challenges
• Community Teaching Project
• Perl as a first language
• Understanding the difficulties of raising a young perl coder...
• Learning Programming¹
• Perl in school

There are many others, but I think the most obvious relevant point is to choose projects that are important to them. In fact, I would make it a team effort, e.g. hold a "meeting" where the lot of you get together and make a list of various projects that they'd like to learn and to build.

Also, there are a lot of applications that come to mind just from the bits you've posted. For example, you mentioned:

• The B-word that strikes fear into all fathers with daughters. This suggests a database of names, email addresses, and (*gak*) telephone numbers.

• Gaming, which suggests a database of high scores, cheat codes, whatever with perhaps a CGI script to upload new scores and/or maintain the currently playing list.

  For that matter, perhaps you could create a little spider that searches the tech sites of the current play list and looks for new patches, FAQ's, or whatever. the results could then be summarized in an RSS file or fired off as an email.

• Networking, which brings in IP addressing, topology, and all those sorts of administriva.

• A certain lack of interest, which suggests that you need to find out what would fire the interest in those particular tots.

I guess the main point is to find out what problems they would find interesting to solve and then work in the skills they need to learn: Basic Programming Skills, Database Design, Careful Design, Research Skills, and so forth. You can cloak these in Gift Lists, comic book libraries, action figure tracking, viewing logs, video tape libraries, or whatever.

In my experience, programming requires a lot of problem solving and critical thinking. If you can get them doing that--and taking direct action to solve their own problems--then you'll help them develop some basic skills they'll need to survive later, whether they turn into programmers or not.

Finally, make sure they're always accomplishing something. Personally, I find training works much better when you're working toward concrete goals. For example, I've taught a variety of coursewares for certain programming languages and my students generally seemed to prefer those that focused on skills that they could then apply to their work and needs.

(BTW, I suggested the meeting earlier because there is generally an element of interaction in all jobs. For example, you may be a lone gun, but you deal with people all the time. If you can help them learn how to deal with other people fairly, then you'll be helping them avoid some of the problems you ran into.²)

Oh, yes....wattle time³....

--f

Footnotes:

¹ - Yes, the root note has been reaped, but there is some good discussion in the orphaned replies.

² - For everyone else: In case you hadn't noticed, I've known growlf in RL for a very long time. So I'm allowed a little gentle ribbing. :-)

³ - ObRef (See #2).