The more ubiquitous the coding skill sets are the more able people will be to learn from their peers and colleges. (personal opinion) Scratch isn't programming it is animating. This looks great for young students (k-6), but it is important that young minds learn what coding really is.
If you know one programming language it is easy to learn others. The reason for this is that there is a common underlying structure between all programming languages. Yes, the details of writing code, debugging, etc are important, but not when one is getting familiar with computation. To often beginners get caught up in the details of setting up a text editor, learning how to use a compiler, learning how to use terminal, etc that it takes forever to get to the point where they learn how to actually compute stuff. By the time that they've learned how to compute stuff they become so nonplussed they give up. I've never used scratch, but I can see its value in getting people to learn how to think computationally. That is much more important in the beginning than learning vim or emacs, bash, etc.
Coding is basically a mathematical model. What he suggesting in essence is learn how math works.
The more ubiquitous the coding skill sets are the more able people will be to learn from their peers and colleges.
(personal opinion) Scratch isn't programming it is animating. This looks great for young students (k-6), but it is important that young minds learn what coding really is.
Where would i begin?
any clue because, lets be honest, i have no idea about coding...
but i know my way around a computer....
If you know one programming language it is easy to learn others. The reason for this is that there is a common underlying structure between all programming languages. Yes, the details of writing code, debugging, etc are important, but not when one is getting familiar with computation. To often beginners get caught up in the details of setting up a text editor, learning how to use a compiler, learning how to use terminal, etc that it takes forever to get to the point where they learn how to actually compute stuff. By the time that they've learned how to compute stuff they become so nonplussed they give up. I've never used scratch, but I can see its value in getting people to learn how to think computationally. That is much more important in the beginning than learning vim or emacs, bash, etc.