[Tutor] Recommended Resurce or strategy for beginning students

[Alan Gauld]

On 04/02/2019 05:14, Matthew Polack wrote:

> We had our first lesson today

Congrats, hope it goes well.
But...

> 2.) Another smaller group started to hit the wall...

I'm not a professional or trained teacher but over
the last 30 years or so I've been involved in classes
teaching everything from 11 years to 70+ years old
students. I've always, without fail, found that some
students (say 10-20% of a class) just don't get
programming. It seems to me that some folks just
don't have their brains wired the right way. It
doesn't matter what tools or languages you use, it
even happens with graphical tools like flow charts.
Some people just don't understand the concepts of
logical flow and problem decomposition.

You can, of course, force feed these folks to some
extent and they will pick up the basics with a
struggle but they will never be able to create
any significant body of code on their own. I'm
sure psychologists etc will have an explanation
for this but I've given up trying to explain it,
I now just accept that some people don't think
that way.

It's a bit like math. Some people don't get that
either. They can learn Pythagoras' theorem and
that it applies to right angled triangles and
that triangles have 3 sides and that it is right
angled if one corner is 90 degrees. But turn such
a triangle on its side and they can no longer see
the right angle, and don't understand how turning
it around doesn't change the size of the angles etc.
It just doesn't make any sense to them. And it
seems the same is true for programming logic.

-- 
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
http://www.amazon.com/author/alan_gauld
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