Watch and Code

What @Jonathan_Blow describes is precisely the focus of my teaching. It is also by far the hardest and most frustrating part of my work. It truly is the last frontier of programming education. Technical competence is nothing in comparison. I tried to describe the same phenomenon in my essay, "A Brief History of Watch and Code". What makes it frustrating is how few people even think it's a problem. It may be a case where only those that understand the problem can see it. watchandcode.com/essays/a-br… From the last section: "The systems I had built were extremely effective at helping students develop technical competence, but there was one final piece, design. You can think of it as taste, judgment, or something else. I still don't know exactly what I should call it. You have two programs, they are both correct. One is pleasing and simple, but the other is ugly and gives you a headache. This is what I mean by design. It turns out, good design, at least the type I'm describing, is chiefly a symptom of clear thinking. The headaches are a symptom of muddled thinking."

Big issue w/ full-time coding bootcamps: 3 mo is followed by a 12+ mo job search (if lucky) that creates a large gap that has to be explained. Companies become concerned & think, "there's likely a reason this person isn't having any luck", so the problem keeps getting worse.

From a conversation this morning: "To be merely competent, you have to stay with something until you understand it. To go beyond that, you have to stay far longer, until all the newness and excitement has worn off."

We're starting to see positive ripple effects from last Friday's proofs workshop. We are trying our hardest to fight against the unreliable-whack-a-mole "I tried a lot of inputs therefore it must be true" method🤦‍♂️. From a student today: "[...] Interestingly, at this stage, writing comments felt ‘proof’ like. There was an intuitive sense, ‘no, this is REALLY right’ this time. I’m not sure if that feeling itself can be fully trusted, but when all the parts of the function are somehow expressing the problem simply and clearly, there is something tangibly different about that [...] This is the first time I’ve written out a reflection like this, increasing the juice I get from one exercise and undermining the tendency to believe that ‘completing quickly’ is always a proxy for skill or growth, or even something that should be aimed for. Quite the contrary, it is this tendency that has HELD ME BACK from developing the carefulness needed to solve problems well."

People are so used to not understanding things that when they do, the reaction is often, "this is too basic, this is obvious, I could've figured it out, not impressed, not complex enough, etc". The common outcome is that people end up valuing misunderstanding over understanding.

We hosted a proofs workshop today (the math kind). Amazed that we've somehow gotten students excited about mathematical thinking. Great to see nerdiness spread. Some attendee quotes: "Is this going to be in the curriculum? I want it as a guide, I want to save it." "I personally found this more useful than the weekly practice problems, would love more sessions like this."