Teaching Programming Now Emphasizes Sharing

An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times explores some of the best ways to teach kids and finds that some of the new tools are encouraging the kids to share their work with each other. One teacher first tried to keep the kids quiet and staring at their own monitors but found it was better to let them copy each other. He calls MIT's Scratch a 'gateway' tool. Then the article points out that programming Blender with Python is not as hard to pick up as your grandparent's programming languages — and kids today are learning them in a few months." The Wikipedia entry on Scratch is worth reading, too.

Sharing

[Threni]

Sounds like a gateway drug into P2P, torrenting, and ultimately murder.

1u1Z

[Anonymous Coward]

0n1y n00bz0r$ u$3 pyt#0|\|, r3@1 #@x0r$ u$3 @$$3m813r!!1! I can't wait to see these kids get introduced to newsgroup flamewars, obfuscated C, IRC abuse and all the other wonderful things in the world of programming.

Re:FTFA: Not sharing so much as building together

[Cajun Hell]

WTF is an "educationalist"?

It's a more respectable title, created by conservative backlash against educologists.

Re:FTFA: Not sharing so much as building together

[hughbar]

I learnt on Babbage's Difference Engine but Lady Ada Lovelace helped me with the harder bits.