Teaching elder people programming GitHub portal 12/9/2014, Warsaw Oskar Jarczyk Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology [email protected]
Jan 17, 2016
Teaching elder people programming
GitHub portal
12/9/2014, Warsaw
Oskar JarczykPolish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology
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