Teaching elder people programming GitHub portal 12/9/2014, Warsaw Oskar Jarczyk Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology oskar.jarczyk@pja.edu.pl.

Teaching elder people programming

GitHub portal

12/9/2014, Warsaw

Oskar JarczykPolish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology

oskar.jarczyk@pja.edu.pl

Topic agenda

• Introduction to the problem of teaching how to code (computer programs)

• Related work regarding teaching elder people technical and computer skills

• Purpose of eliciting knowledge from elder– competing with youth in creating open source

software, small other perks, or total failure ?• What makes the GitHub portal the ’bad’ one?• Vision of a perfect platform for teaching

Introduction

• Teaching how to program computers is a tricky task no matter of a profile of students to which it is addressed.

• A ’technical mind’ will stay technical during his/her whole life span.

• But not neccesarly humanists must be in minority in the class.

• Coding: a new survey has found 28 per cent of UK adults wish they had pursued a career in technology. Emma Mulqueeny, 2012

Related work

• Non-existing for this particular problem

• Related papers about programming (but not on older ppl) or about ICT technologies for older (in general)– "Effects of age and instructions on teaching older adults to use

Eldercomm, an electronic bulletin board system„– Book – „Developing programs in adult education: A conceptual

programming model”

Classic entrée programming classes

• Logo• Pascal -> Delphi

• REXX• Java

• Pseudolanguage• Visual Basic• Visual Basic for Applications

Middle and High School

PJWSTK, 2005

Everywhere and always

Tynker

Code.org

Scratch

• „Older people should be encouraged to learn to code and found their own start-ups, even if that’s in a nursing home.” Vivek Wadhwa, Stanford

• Research conducted at Duke and Harvard in 2008 revealed that the average and median age of the founders of successful technology companies was 39. Twice as many founders were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And there were twice as many over 60 as under 20.

1. Teach entrepreneurship to the old as we do to the young.

2. Fund the startups of the old.3. Don’t just incubate the young.4. Hold hackathons for grandma.5. Drop-out-of-work scholarships.

Vivek Wadhwa, Stanford

• "Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting. Resnick, ACM, 2009

Arduous, laborious

KISS

• Don’t expect to much

Voices against

• „Don't be ridiculous! Grandma can't compete with Mumbai.” random Internet comment

• „Really??? Cognitive and learning abilities decline with age.” random Internet comment

• „It's a novel idea, but pointless if the tech industry and the funders can't see past the age of the potential entrepreneur.” random Internet comment

Alternate purpose

• Work with purpose is more efficient– Voluntarity– Collective knowledge– Small tasks and continuus contributions

• Elicit old knowledge once learnt but now transformed to a code.

• Crowdsourcing– All kind of lists, wiki articles etc.

Validity of knowledge

GitHub portal

(www.github.com)

Sourceforge

GitHub windows native APP

Python IDLE

Code School

End

End

Q&A time

References

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/save-economy-teach-grandma-code/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationadvice/9688442/Why-shouldnt-adults-learn-to-code-too.htmlwww.github.comhttp://tech.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/never-too-late-when-companies-started-infographic.pnghttp://www.tynker.com/http://studio.code.org/flappy/1www.codeschool.com