= Joan = Kirby

The reality of it is, the grandkids are teaching the grandparents who WEREN'T techies, how to do things like make web sites, fiddle the graphics, etc. THese are things the kids have figured out how to do on their own.

Yes, very true, this happens as well. Either way, a lot of new skills and abilities are seeping into kid culture, even if regular schooling is not the source. I used to quote a kid's website about rotation matrices. He put it up for peers interested in writing computer games. "They don't teach this in high school much, so we'll just have to teach each other" was his drift.

The web has to serve as the missing techie grandma, as has already been pointed out here by others, for kids who don't have someone around to show them how to program.

If they've got the web, yes.

The professional programming world has pretty much adopted the idea of one-on-one mentoring of beginners.

Is that so? I wasn't aware of that. One-on-one is great when you can get it (or can be -- you might get paired with someone incompatible), but one-to-many is the more usual mode, at least in the early stages of a discipline.

Unfortunately, any model of CP4E that relies on one-to-one skills transfers is setting itself up for failure.

Agreed.

You could get a lot of people involved by having a volunteer in a local public library at night even one or two nights a month to answer questions that the parents or other involved adults can't answer. You have to publicize it widely. Or have an online equivalent. The Educational Program for Gifted Youth (EPGY) at Stanford has an online classroom that works really well. That same model could work for teaching programming on a one-to-many basis.

Joan

These are good suggestions. Our Computer Center at Princeton did free classes (this was 1976-1980 for me, dunno if it's still like that today), and people from the community could just come learn. It really helps to have the right set-up, i.e. a projected monitor so the presenter can show stuff, including alpha-numeric, in big type. My view is that if you plan to pen kids inside an institution for 12 years (called a "school"), you should plan to make at least some computer programming a part of everyone's experience, and not just as some special "advance subject" off in a corner. Math class looks like a logical place to phase it in. Right now, they're using calculators a lot in math class, but I think that's an artificially limiting approach. But as Matthius points out, this is a really difficult idea to get across. Given the slowness of the text book upgrade cycle, innovations of this kind take maybe 20 years to implement, or more. And it's even worse than that. We have innovations having to do with polyhedra and sphere packing, that could make spatial geometry a whole lot more accessible and relevant to students. It's already been 20 years on those. Still no change. When I was I kid, Sputnik happened and that shook things up some. People were willing to try new things, to acknowledge that the curriculum was falling behind, needed to be suffused with new ideas. I'm not sure what the next Sputnik will be. Seems educators are pretty complacent about the status quo these days. Or maybe that's just my biased perspective. Kirby