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Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Lends Nickname to New 'Woz U' Online Institute Offering Coding Lessons
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Teaching human languages (past the first one, which you basically get for free with most people), is a matter of teaching rules and things to memorize. Teaching programming is a matter of that plus teaching logic and reasoning, and thinking outside oneself (i.e. fine, you know how to put that block on top of the others - can you explain how to do so well enough that someone with zero prior knowledge or assumptions - a computer - can do the same thing?). Teaching programming is teaching how to teach, amongst other things. There are, indeed, a lot of things to memorize, but if you only memorize, rather than learning to recognize the patterns in the underlying structures, you end up memorizing too much and knowing too little (think of every person who has piles of written-down lists of steps for doing each thing on their computer).
I, too, would like to see better and more popular ways to teach people how to program (because it's just generally a useful thing to know, and because it encourages logical thought - something far too scarce in today's society - and because I want my nieces to learn how, in a few years). Swift Playgrounds is a step in the right direction. There are a bunch of other projects working to teach kids to program (Scratch, Blocky, etc.), but none that has really caught on with the public like your example of Duolingo.
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The problem isn't that Steve Wozniak has opinions - he's a brilliant guy, after all, I'm still in awe of how he implemented floppy disk drives on the Apple II mostly in software - the problem is that a lot of people take his opinions as gospel, just the way many people accept every idea Steve Jobs had, uncritically, as though Moses brought it down from the mountain carved on stone tablets. They are (were, in Jobs' case) absolutely brilliant people, and that means it's worth listening to what they have to say, but that doesn't mean every word is correct.
Generally programming books and online videos cruze along until the learner gets stuck. This is because the book/video has a hole in the curriculum that assumes the learner knows something. Don’t assume and FIELD test the curriculum. Another problem is that every time Apple upgrades Objective C they also upgrade XCode - which is huge and controls gazillions of things. The hardest part as a curriculum designer is probably keeping up with changes.
So if you have something that you want to test, I’d love to help. But remember, the LEARNER is always right. If the learner doesn’t understand a section, that section needs to be re-worked.
Yes, let's blur that solid black background.Woz's photo could use more Portrait Mode.
Colour photos with black backgrounds don't usually look very good, especially as most of the colour is skin, which is kinda pointless and hard to get right.
Hmm, I'm wondering if you meant to quote some other post, because I was merely discussing the ways in which programming is more complex to teach than human languages. I am not developing teaching materials, so the admonishments seem misplaced. Oh, also, I think Objective C would be a terrible choice to teach as a first language.
They're the new high-school diploma. One with a 2.1 GPA.
Maybe he can help fix that.
It's possible to respect education and not want to go to college! Or in his case, change your mind halfway through.
Some of the smartest, most productive people never darken the doors of college as they understand how poor their learning environments are. Not all, mind you, but a vast majority are nothing but paper mills tuning out fiat intellectuals who are incompetent, broke and unfit for skilled employment.
The reason for the 'sales pitch' is to ensure that not only is Woz-U a good fit for you, but that you are a good fit for Woz. Believe it or not, not everyone who wants to go to Woz-U get's in. Why would spend that much money on something that someone hasn't told you anything about? You're not shopping on Amazon, you're looking for a new career!