

Ask HN: How Could Schools Teach Programming? - nbashaw

In theory, teaching kids to hack in school is a brilliant idea. But there's a lot of challenges to overcome. I'm wondering if any of you have experience with this or ideas.
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brudgers
<forKids> Based on my belief that programming is not something which should
only be taught to those on the college track, programming could be taught as a
vocation rather than an academic pursuit. In other words, rather than a one
hour class with homework and labs - it could be taught in more of an all day
studio type environment similar to the way electronics was traditionally
taught in trade school certificate type programs.</forKids>

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dstein
I've always thought that high school physics & algebra should be taught as
computer game programming lessons.

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tfitzgerald
This depends, what grades are we talking about?

I worked in a K-8 school where the computer teacher used Scratch
(<http://scratch.mit.edu/>) to teach programming in the lower grades.

What are the challenges you feel need to be overcome?

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nbashaw
I think the biggest challenge is teacher knowledge. There just aren't many
people in middle/high school classrooms that know anything about programming.

Scratch does look really cool for lower grades. I was more thinking of
teaching actual production languages to high schoolers though.

