Michael Sperber
Mike's first programming experiences were in the local department
store, and his formative learning experiences were all shaped by the
hacker culture of the 1980s. Since then, he was a university
researcher and educator (and researcher on education), a freelance
developer, and finally a CEO. He has continuously taught programming
in high schools, universities, to kids, and commercially.
Session
Do you want to teach programming to others? At school? To friends?
Family? Co-workers? This is (hopefully) the workshop for you!
Teaching programming is hard, and often fails, resulting in
frustration. One of the reasons is that teaching programming has
mostly focussed on an example-based approach, essentially by trial and
error. Unfortunately, this approach mostly only works for privileged
students with plenty of time to spare, and who are happy to take
risks. Moreover, even when it does work, it often produces buggy and
unreliable code. In this workshop, we'll focus on a systematic
approach to teaching, which has produced good results in many
settings, particularly, as part of the
DeinProgramm,
Program by Design, and
Bootstrap educational projects. While
there's lots of material, we'll also have of time to chat and
discuss alternative approaches.