Teaching My Son to Program, When I Don’t Know How
March 23rd, 2008 | Published in Blake, Programming
I was already short on spare time before I took on this project. Now it appears that I’m in way over my head.
My son, Blake, who is ten years old, told me that he wants to learn how to program computers. I thought I could probably help him because when I was his age, I did a little programming with Basic. In fact in elementary school, I was part of the Computer Club. I was a wiz with computers back then. I figured once a wiz, always a wiz. I was wrong.
It turns out that programming (anything useful anyway) takes a much higher level of programming language than Basic, and since we’re on Macs, we need to learn how to Program in Objective-C using a Cocoa framework, Xcode, and Interface Builder.
What does that last part mean? I don’t really know. It’s very, very confusing.
Rising to the challenge, I thought I could learn just enough to turn around and teach it to my son, so I bought a book called “Beginning Mac OS X Programming” and started studying it one chapter at a time. It seemed ideal. Both of us would end up learning it together. As the teacher, I would really learn it, because the best way to learn something is to teach it, right?
Now 150 pages into the book, I’m completely confused.
We covered variables and some basic conditional statements. And now we’re stumped. Rather, I’m stumped — which means he’s not getting much further. I feel bad for him because he wants to learn to program right now, and I can’t help him. I realize that there are probably classes out there, private tutors, maybe even audio/visual resources available for check out, which would cover the material in a way he would understand. I suppose we’ll start looking for those types of resources.
Lesson to be learned here? It’s difficult to teach something I’m clueless about.
Additional lesson? Research, then commit. :-)
