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Ask HN: How to help someone learn to code?

6 points by mxab ↗ HN
My girlfriend is currently struggling with some courses that require a basic understanding of how to write code. It's not so much that she can't learn the syntax of whatever language is used, her difficulties start at a lower level, i.e. at what one might call algorithmic thinking.

I'm having a hard time helping and explaining these things to her, so I was wondering whether someone here knows some literature or MOOCs or tricks or whatever that focuses on teaching total beginners, ideally in a language-agnostic way.

Thanks for any help!

5 comments

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GreenItalics
I've been helping some friends learn programming, and they probably wouldn't describe themselves as algorithmic thinkers. What I found was a good starting point was talking about basic boolean logic and truth tables. The topic was really straightforward, felt foundational and there are tons of examples in all kinds of topics.

From there, we started talking about simple circuits/gates like AND, OR, etc. Then we started talking binary (and other bases), then binary arithmetic. At the end, I went over how integers are stored from a high level (and integer overflow for fun :) ).

There really wasn't a super high-level plan, but exposure to these topics I felt was a great intro to the mindset and we had good fun/progression during the session. From here, with booleans & integers as the foundation, I might feel comfortable writing pseudo-code and such with them, slowly bringing the abstraction higher.

Theophraustous
I've taught a few friends the basics by using codecademy's free javascript course while also tutoring. Unless they've changed it, it has you build a simple console cash register. It introduces each of it's concepts very organically, & if they get stuck on any of javascript's idiosyncrasies I'm there.
otras
Is she looking for a full course? If so, I highly, highly recommend Harvard's online CS50. Tremendous course, and I think it gives a really great foundation for algorithmic thinking.

If she's looking for something a little less intense, MIT's Intro to Programming w/ EdX is also a great way to learn more about problem solving, and since it's in python it's a little more approachable.

Both are free and online, and I highly recommend either of them.