Learnable Programming

> Mark,
>
>> Jecel, you may be confounding two things:
>> - Having a mental model: "seeing" a FOR loop in one's mind.
>> - Seeing a visual representation of something like a FOR loop.
>
> That was my intention, which is why I used the same work for both cases
> rather than the more proper "imagining" for the first one.
>
>> There's some research in the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center
>> (SILC, http://www.spatiallearning.org) that suggests that we encourage
>> more of the former by doing less of the latter.  A bad visual
>> representation can actually lead you astray.  Sketching and gesture may be
>> more effective at encouraging the development of internal representations.
>
> Very true, but what interests me is if these internal representations
> are always visual. For me they are, but Zed Shaw seems to think some
> people can think of how programs work in purely linguistic terms.
>
> Of course, an external visual representation can get in the way of an
> internal one. If you read a book and imagine how a given character looks
> and what they sound like, it can be very jarring to see the movie with
> an actor who is very different.
>
> So is the problem a matter of the teacher having a visual learning style
> and the student a non visual one or is it a matter of the teacher's
> visual style being different from the student's?
>
>> I blogged on Bret Victor's excellent essay here:
>> http://computinged.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/learnable-programming-thinking-
>> about-programming-languages-and-systems-in-a-new-way/  My concern is about
>> the things that aren't easily translated into a visual form, like user
>> input in the future and the Internet.
>
> But we are talking about the first lessons and in that case we can
> choose the domain. We can select games or turtle graphics instead of
> Fibonacci sequences. The visual stuff can be training wheels to be
> outgrown. Though I prefer to always have stuff as visual as possible -
> just compare the debugger in Self with the one in Squeak, for example.
>
> Karl wrote:
>> I have seen Bret Victors stuff and found them a little lacking in the
>> abstract side of programming.
>>
>> Much of computing hard to show as graphic. Graphics is good up to a
>> certain limit where the complexity in the graphics is as hard to grasp
>> as the language complexity in question.
>
> What can't be understood as a graph due to that becoming too complex and
> yet can be understood in some other way? As I mentioned above, I am a
> purely visual person and am limited by that. If other people can really
> understand something as purely an equation or some other form and so can
> do stuff that I can't, then great! But I can only design languages and
> programming environment for people I know.