At last night’s AJUG meeting Burr asked the group a couple of questions about technologies needed today to be hired directly onto a team. The question morphed a little into ‘what would you tell a 15 year old to learn’ if they wanted to be in technology. That question got things going in a different direction with a lot of good feedback.
This post is about my thoughts on this, since I have a 15 year old, although one that isn’t interested in being a programmer.
First would be to learn how to think. I know that sounds strange, but learn how to take data and ask questions or given a problem think about how to solve it. Even when I was in elementary school 30+ years ago, a lot of what we learned was how to apply the processes and algorithms we were taught to the examples/questions we were given. Not, given this poorly defined problem, figure out how to solve it with your full knowledge, not just what the teacher gave you yesterday. Think of it as the difference between geometry on calculating the angle on a graph and assembling a Lego house without instructions.
How do you teach someone to think? Unfortunately I don’t really know. With 3 kids I see that each of them learns differently and the processes I use to help each learn something is different. My only advice on learning how to think: has them questions that aren’t what the teacher taught them in the same area, or ask a different set of questions from what the homework asked. For example, Courtney is working on European history during the colonization times. The expected answer about why the Europeans wanted colonies (from the book) didn’t include the greed factor. And the arrogance factor. So I pushed her to think like the King or Queen during that time and see what you’d want. While she was able to give the 'book' answer, she is also learning to think in someone else shoes.
Back to technology. Thinking about technology, I think learning any language that is ‘backend’ focused isn’t a good place to start. Java, C, Groovy, Ruby, C++, Perl and non-UI languages won’t interest the kids. Instead pair them with something that shows immediate usefulness. So use Grails or Ruby on Rails or even GWT. Get them working on making something they can see and show off.
When I learned to program, most people didn’t interact with computers each day, so showing a green-screen output from the Fortran or C I was writing to my peers or parents was novel and unique. Today, everyone knows the web and a browser so showing them a text output isn’t going to get the response the programmer needs as encouragement to continue. Show someone a web page you built and I’ll bet most kids will get ‘wow, I wish I could do that’ as a response.
Once they have a basic language under their belts, look at the Platform as a Service cloud systems like Microsoft’s Azure, Google’s AppEngine or even Force.com. Why? Because I believe these platforms are going to be where a lot of the jobs are will be in the future. Whether it is a startup taking an idea that MAY require greater scale later, but not today, or the IT developer putting together applications for departments to address specific business problems, these platforms are going to make it easy to deploy solutions fast, instead of waiting on hardware purchases. Of course the whole ISV space is going to make a comeback because of these technologies.
Finally, encourage the kids to get out of the house and play. Build things like go-carts and bird houses. Learn to cook, even if using a recipe from a big cook book (Better is a hand written card from Grandma) Encourage them to take things apart to see how they work. The digital world makes this hard, but what about their bike, scooter or old rusted car sitting in the garage?
1 comment:
Very interesting post... how to make kids learn to think... I believe that the number one thing we as parents can do to help kids learn to think is to encourage curiosity. Although I know that curiosity of your "little guy" at this point can be a pain to deal with, but I firmly believe that curiosity at a young age leads directly to intelligence at a later age.
Years ago I remember Camille being a little frustrated at how curious one (or both) of our boys were. Making myself out to be the hero here, I said "that is GREAT! Curiosity is the best attribute a kid can have going into school..." too bad the formal education process does so much to discourage curiosity in kids. But then if they did it all right, what would we need parents for!
As far as the IT business goes, I have long been of the opinion that engineers make very good software developers (of course I are an engineer (bad grammar intentional)). The reason for this is all of that seemingly worthless calculus and DE that engineers have to take. But looking back on that education I had in the 70's, I see now that all good developers have one thing in common, and that is the ability to model complex things into software models. And what is the ultimate modeling language? Math!
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