<story><title>A Hacker Writes a Children&apos;s Book</title><url>http://arthur-johnston.com/hacker_writes_a_childrens_book/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>a-nikolaev</author><text>To me the books looks quite underwhelming. It seems focused too much on the superficial aspects of programming, like jargon a software engineer may mention occasionally at home. It may look fun and appealing to their adult parent. But what can a child learn from it?&lt;p&gt;Maybe doing more with math (even if at 1+1=2 level), repetitive processes as loops, idea of recursion, idea that a computer cannot compute more than one can do with pencil and paper.. More _universal_ aspects of computation can be really illuminating to kids, I think.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jesperlang</author><text>The author says the purpose of this book was to answer &amp;quot;what daddy does at work&amp;quot; so in that regard I don&amp;#x27;t think it&amp;#x27;s underwhelming. However, I can&amp;#x27;t help but think that adults (programmers) will enjoy this more than children. As a teaching book for programming it&amp;#x27;s quite underwhelming indeed!&lt;p&gt;I am a programmer but I have always been interested in the learning process and mentoring. So in recent year I have conducted some self-study on these topics. Now this is such an immense topic and I have surrendered to my ignorance on so many levels. But, from what I can tell, there is a lot of dogma that we trust blindly, a lot of great old ideas of course (Piaget, Dewey, etc) that have been a great influence but not enough (and simplifying an incredibly complex topic).&lt;p&gt;Some insights I&amp;#x27;ve had that have made me realize how hard education is getting right (forgive the simplifying, but it needs to fit a HN comment)&lt;p&gt;* Children have many different ways of understanding and sense-making, but we have a very simplified&amp;#x2F;dogmatic view of how chilren learn.&lt;p&gt;* We seem to overemphasize practical activity at the expense of other ways of grasping meaning (e.g abstract thinking)&lt;p&gt;* We make false assumptions: &amp;quot;The absence of abstraction awarness or articulation  of it is a sign that abstractions are not at work in their thinking&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;* ...I could go on..&lt;p&gt;Barely scratching the surface I have realized how little I know. This is such an interesting topic and you can learn a lot studying the pioneers, Piaget, Montessori, etc. but always have a critical eye! More recent literature I can highly recommend the works of Kieran Egan.&lt;p&gt;Being an educator is incredibly rewarding but I think we as programmers need to be much more humble when approaching the teaching practice..</text></comment>
<story><title>A Hacker Writes a Children&apos;s Book</title><url>http://arthur-johnston.com/hacker_writes_a_childrens_book/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>a-nikolaev</author><text>To me the books looks quite underwhelming. It seems focused too much on the superficial aspects of programming, like jargon a software engineer may mention occasionally at home. It may look fun and appealing to their adult parent. But what can a child learn from it?&lt;p&gt;Maybe doing more with math (even if at 1+1=2 level), repetitive processes as loops, idea of recursion, idea that a computer cannot compute more than one can do with pencil and paper.. More _universal_ aspects of computation can be really illuminating to kids, I think.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>racl101</author><text>Yeah, I can see most kids just respond: &amp;quot;huh? Mom, can we read &amp;#x27;The Going To Bed Book&amp;#x27; again?&amp;quot;</text></comment>