I’d never call myself a real programmer. But it was real programming. Even the tiniest little bits, like yesterday’s simple hack, are real.
A few months later I blogged about this as being the 'home cook equivalent' of a programmer https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2020/02/i-am-the-programming-equivalent-of-a-home-cook/
creating applications in Excel is real programming too
Hermans proved that Excel is Turing complete in her thesis.
there are many drop-outs that way, that the acquired skill level flattens out quickly, and that there’s no efficiency gain visible in consequent activities of the children involved
there is a big opportunity cost to unassisted learning to code: many people will drop-out (in frustration). Again this is how the IndieWeb community quickly drives people away too. the skill level acquired this way is limited (due to absence of Vgl deliberate practice?) the acquired skills do not make following activities more efficient. (Vgl how I usually struggle with the same basic coding issues, no matter how many scripts I try to write).
getting stuck and unstuck on your own is the way to go.
Still very common to observe as example of such 'coder's ethics'. E.g. IndieWeb community discussion is mostly based on figuring things out yourself and creating one's own code (self-dogfooding), with only generic and hand-wavy assistance most of the time.
many of us acquired our own tech skills strongly shapes the assumptions about learning to code
The way you learned programming shapes assumptions about how to learn programming.
The fact I self-learned through trial and error without supervision in the early and mid 80s, is common, but not a model for K transfer, and not useful "coder's ethic"
she says in contrast to e.g. reading, we don’t know much of anything about teaching programming. There’s no body of work
Hermans posits that there is no actual body of work about how to effectively teach programming. In contrast to reading.
Felienne Hermans
Now a professor at VU Amsterdam. In #2019/ we both keynoted NL CoderDojo Conf. and I blogged this beforehand.