The desire to learn and understand can be a powerful accelerant for students and it’s something that is completely missing from almost all Computer Science education. Once they start to explore and figure out things for themselves then they can begin to dig into all the explanatory tutorials and documentation that are provided to clarify how things work. Rather than starting Computer Science education off by explicitly teaching how a computer works or fundamental programming concepts (like variables, logic, control structures, etc.) you put the student into code of graduated complexity and encourage them to manipulate, explore, and write their own programs. When code is so interactive, and the actual process of interacting with code is in-and-of-itself a learning process, it becomes very important to put code front-and-center to the learning experience. In an environment that is truly responsive you can completely change the model of how a student learns: rather than following the typical write -> compile -> guess it works -> run tests to see if it worked model you can now immediately see the result and intuit how underlying systems inherently work without ever following an explicit explanation. Until I saw Bret Victor‘s mind-blowing talk on using a responsive programming environment.Īfter watching that video I couldn’t shake the feeling that what he presented was a fundamentally different way of approaching how to interact with, and learn how to, code. MethodologyĮarlier this year I was working on an iteration of the CS platform which was heavily focused on structured curriculum leading towards exploratory projects.
Jamie Wong, who worked on the CS platform this summer, has also written up a blog post on his experience developing the platform. To get started feel free to visit the Khan Academy Computer Science site:Įxplore, play around, and build something!
Sal Khan and I recorded a video giving a good introduction to what we’re releasing: Over everything else we wanted to emphasize creativity and exploration and make it approachable for people of all ages, including young kids. We’re releasing a completely new platform that targets people with no programming knowledge and gives them an engaging and fun environment to learn in. I’m incredibly excited to take this opportunity to announce a new project that I’ve been leading here at Khan Academy: Khan Academy Computer Science.
0 kommentar(er)
