Coming back stronger than a powered-up Pac-man

[venta]

Seen via pseudomonas:

When you see this, make a post in your journal or in a community. It can be anything: a crosspost something you've posted on Tumblr, a few words about the last thing you read/watched, or just a "Hi, how is everyone?" Then go read your f-list and leave at least one comment.

Last night I watched the first of the RI Christmas Lectures, in which they turned the Shell Building into a giant screen and played Tetris.

Which was great, and will hopefully (as intended) interest kids in engineering. And for only the 6th time (in 189 years) it was delivered by a woman. Girls can be engineers, too! There was a lot of suggestion that you should be trying this at home, with Raspberry Pis or Makey Makey boards. All good.

I wondered how they were going to handle the "code game" part of their plan to subvert the Shell Building. Even Tetris is a pretty long, complicated bit of code if you're just starting out.

So they did a quick intro to Python, with CBBC 's explosions expert demoing how to blow up some balloons using code.

To which my reaction was "CBBC has an explosions expert?!" But apparently yes, and she wheeled in some kit and blew some stuff up.

We got to see lines of Python, and she explained that each balloon was "an output", and we needed to find where it said "balloon1" in the code and replace it with the output number.  (Replacing named constants with hard-coded values? Err, okay.)  Then she ran the code (by pressing a large button) and everything went bang in proper Christmas Lecture fashion.

Danielle George (the lecturer) then skated over the Tetris code, pointing out a line or two, and we went to the big finish.

Which seemed fine as an approach. Show something simple, skip the detail. Give people an inspiring idea of what they could do. But whenever I've heard people talk about not understanding programming, the sticking point was getting started. Showing something even simpler that you could do at home would have been a good idea, before getting all explodey.

Maybe I'm making a problem where none exists. Perhaps today's kids are quite happy Googling "getting started with Python". But a year or two ago, colleagues' kids were bringing their Raspberry Pis into the engineering department at my old company because they couldn't work out how to get started with them.

Teaching someone to code isn't really a topic for a 60-minute fun lecture. But I do wonder if, as well as big-picture inspiration, a tiny bit more nitty-gritty would have been a good idea.

Comments

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

As a parent of one of today's kids: yes, he's happy Googling such things or raiding his father's shelves for books on his chosen language of the day. (So far: Sinclair BASIC, Rexx, C+, and something even more obscure than Rexx that I've forgotten already.) It's me that wouldn't be - and I used to be comfortable enough in BASIC that I wrote (longhand) long rambling choose-your-own-adventure programs during boring lessons - so if he put a Raspberry Pi in front of me and said 'what can we do?' I'd be stuck. Though we do know at least two dozen people who wouldn't be, and I might even understand the explanations from some of them. :)

We haven't watched the RI lectures yet (unless he's been watching them on iplayer with his dad) and I'll be interested to know what he makes of this one.

[vicarage.livejournal.com]

Rexx! I started work at IBM with that in 1985, and it was obsolete then!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I have been to not one, not two, but five Rexx symposia. I kid you not. :)

As a result I have: been to a proper US baseball game with a team I'd actually heard of beforehand (the Durham Bulls), breastfed in the IBM museum in Stuttgart, and nearly got myself arrested as a pedestrian in North Carolina and California, among other experiences, so it's not an entirely wasted set of trips. And Mike Cowlishaw is lovely.

[venta.livejournal.com]

... butsmallclanger does have a programming parent, with such a shelf of books. Which I suspect will put him ahead in the Just Googling stakes when it comes to such things.

Obviously you have a much better idea of the kids of today than I do, though!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

True, but I suspect he'd still happily Google for this sort of thing even if he didn't have that advantage. From what he tells me of IT lessons at school they're all pretty much at that point now. And I'm pretty sure they don't all have dads who work for university computing departments. :)

(It worries me slightly that despite being surrounded by them he doesn't really know how to use reference books yet, but there's time for that. Or maybe Google really will be all he needs in the future.)

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Ah, I wondered how she was going to get from repeating the same sentence 3 times in 5 minutes to coding up Tetris in one lecture. I got rapidly frustrated once I'd been watching for 10 minutes because it had that first year university feeling where they introduce the same simple concept over and over again until you want to gouge lumps out of the desk because you are so bored, and then do some massive light-speed leap glossing over the bit you actually came to learn to get something that looks flashy at the end. Fair enough to go slowly for an audience of kids, but I *hate* that whooshing over.

I mean, I'm glad a woman is doing it, and not only that but a woman is doing *something that isn't biology* because all too often in public science things they have male physicists and female biologists, but it's not a pattern of speeds I personally get on with.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Also if I had been taking a drink whenever she fitted the word Shell in there, I would have been legless by halfway through.

[venta.livejournal.com]

I did find it rather repetitive in delivery, but thee and me are not the target audience :) I don't really know enough about educating children to know whether repetition is good (and I'm not actually sure what the target age of the lectures is).

There was a bit of whooshing, but I guess it's a trade, off between explaining everything fully, and getting in an hour to something impressive enough to be inspiring.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

I'm not actually sure what the target age of the lectures is
11-17 for legal purposes; under-11s can watch from an adjacent room but cannot be part of the filming. Which, combined with the material in lectures I've seen in previous years, suggests to me that the target age range of the actual lecture is generally pitched somewhere around 9-14. Late KS2 to KS3.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. From the delivery, I might have guessed at a little younger than that.

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

There is a cartoon about this http://philippe.ameline.free.fr/wordpress/?p=1031 (lots of versions, no idea what the original is)

[sammason.livejournal.com]

I didn't understand all of your post but one thing jumps out at me. Yes, girls can be engineers. A few weeks ago when, as you know, I attended a STEM Ambassadors' social*, one of the presentations was by a pair of teachers extolling the STEM Club they run for school students. These teachers spoke about the tendency for STEM Club members to be boys. Then they said that they provided a STEMettes club for girls, and it's popular.

Being new to the STEM Ambassadors' Programme I wasn't ready to challenge these teachers but I hope there'll be another chance to do that. STEMettes? Eh? Sounds like a girl group singing 1960s pop music. Why not STEM Girls or Girls Got STEM? I hope for chance to extoll Grandma got STEM https://ggstem.wordpress.com/ and to invite people to think about the backlash against Science: It's a Girl Thing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA


* For anybody reading your blog who doesn't know this: STEM Ambassadors are volunteers whose role is to inspire young people towards science, technology, engineering and maths.

[timeplease.livejournal.com]

This thread in Google Groups is interesting.

There is a more detailed write-up from Ben here.

(I know Ben and Tom from London Hackspace and EMFcamp.)

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

When I was at school years ago, we got taken to something similar to the Christmas Lectures which was run by the University of Liverpool I think. I believe the idea was to inspire us to think about our future career possibilities. The lecture was about electric money and the possibilities of a future without hard cash and I think it was sponsored by RBS.

As a result of the lecture I am pleased to say I avoided any possible careers in banking, finance and accounting based on the fact that there wouldn't be any actual money for us to count and all accounting would be done on futuristic things called computers....

[exspelunca.livejournal.com]

As someone through higher education before the days of pocket calculators, I'd have liked the programming explained but suspect it would be like computer instruction manuals and would go from the basics you can understand to brain-frying concepts with no middle stage.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

The modern learn-to-code stuff can be very forgiving and handles a lot of the difficult stuff for you. The abstraction layer gets you miles up to start with. And then beyond that it's fairly easy to fiddle with. Scratch, for instance, lets you work in essentially script-kiddie mode, tweaking working programs to make them how you like ... and maybe learning how they did it so you can do it yourself.

My own first coding experience was on Lunar Lander on the ZX81, where I edited the 'heavy but just-about successful landing' message to include more lurid descriptions of injuries.

That sort of thing is how most good coder I've talked to started. (Not that I am a good one.) They all got to grips with a serious language from the ground up at some point, but very few people get good at programming by coming to a blank editor screen completely cold.

And yes, most kids these days just expect to be able to get hold of practical information just-in-time when they need it. Mine certainly won't accept "I don't know" as an answer from me - from the early verbal stages they've demanded "well look it up Daddy!". (We're moving to "let me help you to ...", but Daddy doing it is still quicker.)