What Our Children Can Teach Us About Distance Learning and Learning Programming

摘要

At a time when CS academia is busy with discussions about issues of recruitment, our children are spending hours on their computers, certain that what they're doing is 'play' and 'socialising', and equally certain that what they're not doing is CS. But some of their activities look like programming, and they delve into the vast Internet resource pool of tools and components with astonishing facility [1]. 10- and 12-year-old girls who declare themselves averse to programming are programming animated emoticons in Flash to import into their MSN dialogues. Pre-teens are opening program files for commercial games and altering them to introduce 'cheats' or to create new characters or capabilities.