Basics of programming for children and the humanities - no computers in the classroom!
Ubi De Feo conducts Arduino programming courses for beginners in the Dutch “Hello, Savants!” Creative workshop. The main audience - designers, artists and other people far from computers who want to learn how to use technology to create interactive presentations, prototypes, art objects - what is called "creative coding". His students have no problems with imaginative thinking and creativity, but abstract concepts of mathematics and programming often become an insurmountable obstacle. Therefore, De Feo decided to start out altogether from using computers. In the introductory lessons of the “From 0 to C” course, only notebooks, pens, ping-pong balls, cardboard boxes, and M & M's candies are used.
Students jointly perform simple operations, moving objects according to certain rules and writing down intermediate results on paper. Ping-pong ball - one bit. A cardboard box with four compartments for the balls is one hexadecimal digit, a pair of boxes is byte. Such a presentation allows you to quickly become familiar with the binary and hexadecimal systems, to understand how a computer works with memory and data.
Students are involved in a game in which they, without even realizing it, become a model of a working computer. Memory, registers, stack, branches, cycles are transformed from abstract concepts into concrete actions and images. All that remains to be done is to write down the sequence of these actions. Only at this stage the syntax of the programming language is introduced. For the absolute beginner in general, everything that happens inside the computer is magic. A superficial knowledge of the syntax of any language gives only "spells" to control this magic, without the slightest hint of a real understanding of the essence. Visual lessons expose this magic better than any books and explanations.
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The course " From 0 to C " is not tied exclusively to C, other languages can be used as basic ones. De Feo enters to adapt this course for children so that it can be used in schools. He is enthusiastic to make this course accessible to a wide audience and to create on its basis courses for other scientific disciplines.
UPD: In a letter, De Feo said that in the near future he plans to hold in Amsterdam several lessons specifically for technical specialists and teachers who are interested in his methodology. He has already received an unofficial offer of support from one of the crowdfunding sites and several job offers from different companies, but for now his main goal is to give the course a complete look, and only then look for ways to spread it. He emphasizes that for him this project is non-commercial and any sponsorship will be directed primarily to the development and dissemination of the methodology.
Students jointly perform simple operations, moving objects according to certain rules and writing down intermediate results on paper. Ping-pong ball - one bit. A cardboard box with four compartments for the balls is one hexadecimal digit, a pair of boxes is byte. Such a presentation allows you to quickly become familiar with the binary and hexadecimal systems, to understand how a computer works with memory and data.
Students are involved in a game in which they, without even realizing it, become a model of a working computer. Memory, registers, stack, branches, cycles are transformed from abstract concepts into concrete actions and images. All that remains to be done is to write down the sequence of these actions. Only at this stage the syntax of the programming language is introduced. For the absolute beginner in general, everything that happens inside the computer is magic. A superficial knowledge of the syntax of any language gives only "spells" to control this magic, without the slightest hint of a real understanding of the essence. Visual lessons expose this magic better than any books and explanations.
')
The course " From 0 to C " is not tied exclusively to C, other languages can be used as basic ones. De Feo enters to adapt this course for children so that it can be used in schools. He is enthusiastic to make this course accessible to a wide audience and to create on its basis courses for other scientific disciplines.
UPD: In a letter, De Feo said that in the near future he plans to hold in Amsterdam several lessons specifically for technical specialists and teachers who are interested in his methodology. He has already received an unofficial offer of support from one of the crowdfunding sites and several job offers from different companies, but for now his main goal is to give the course a complete look, and only then look for ways to spread it. He emphasizes that for him this project is non-commercial and any sponsorship will be directed primarily to the development and dissemination of the methodology.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/147958/
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