<story><title>How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon</title><url>http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-kids-stole-show-young-coders.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>sophacles</author><text>&lt;i&gt;“I don&apos;t think you&apos;d ever see that kind of experimentation in a classroom full of adults, who would more likely do everything in their power not to break their computers,”...&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I really think, more than anything, this is why we should be teaching kids to code and so on in school. Most of the good coders I know have been doing it from a young age, and I think a lot of it comes from the fearlessness of youth.&lt;p&gt;Personally, I know I owe a lot to this. I &quot;broke&quot; the computer more times than I can count, by just experimenting, playing and otherwise doing stuff that I now know to be &quot;reckless&quot;. There was a guy in the IT department and my dad&apos;s work who gave me an absurd number of hours of free tech support and teaching, because I couldn&apos;t figure out how to undo some of those mistakes, and would patiently walk me through getting things put right before my folks came home from work. (In retrospect, I don&apos;t think they would have minded, but I didn&apos;t want to get in trouble for breaking the expensive toy!)</text></comment>
<story><title>How the kids stole the show: Young Coders tutorial at PyCon</title><url>http://pycon.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-kids-stole-show-young-coders.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>undershirt</author><text>I was interested in teaching a 6th grade class how to make a video game.  I volunteered at Citizen Schools to teach a 90 minute session per week over 10 weeks at a low-income school.  Made them a simple IDE where they could draw things and make them move around the screen with high-level Lua code.&lt;p&gt;It was largely a disaster due to classroom management issues, though 3 students did complete a game.  I definitely think the 1:3 teacher-student ratio mentioned in the article is necessary to making this kind of thing successful.</text></comment>