Blog Article

Teach learning to Code

Published: September 30, 2019

I ran across this awesome podcast, [https://ladybug.dev/episode/teaching-code/], that discusses teaching how to teach people learning to Code. I love the baseline here that these 3 awesome ladies are not formally trained educators and have great insight into being a successful teacher.

A couple of highlights that hit home for me:

Impostor syndrome in the coding aspect. Really important that the coding arena has people who have been coding for 10 years and those that are in their first day -- both are equally curious. We need to take that into account and touch base with everyone periodically.

Knowing what questions to ask. This is the part I struggle with the most when coding. I just struggled for about 2 weeks trying to implement some code using new tools and environments. My code was continually not working and I tried like 10 different approaches. Finally I figured out which question I had and asked for some help. They were super helpful and gave me a quick direction with a link to a specific method in the API. That link helped me realize a different solution that got me up and running.

In the technical conventions vs real world conventions. Sometimes there are esoteric conventions in coding that are not required for the code to run, however if someone else (even your future self) is going to read the code there are probably real-world conventions to work better together.

Technical connections with real-world analogies. Even though there might be a bunch of technical material abound, it doesn't mean there isn't space for your perspective. It only takes a one perspective to give you insight into a connection or something to 'hang your hat on'. I loved the analogy connecting asynchronous programming with ordering food at a restaurant.

The part that hit home the most is that in my mind these are all great ways to teach math as well as coding. There is a big parallel to teaching math and teaching code. I do think that any good teacher can teach code, it takes the ability to connect with students and break down learning skills into ingestable bites. Not all coders can teach, even if they are amazing coders--just like math.