Coming back stronger than a powered-up Pac-man

[venta]

Seen via pseudomonas:

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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

[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.)