Teach kids how to code by solving their own Maths problems

When i was participating the Hack the Curriculum event last month I realised that we risk doing to coding what we have done to Maths (see A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form, available as pdf or book)

We are trying to teach kids how to code in an abstract and 'technical' way, instead of letting them use programming to make the computer do 'something' (which is exactly how most of us learned how to code)

Teaching kids what is a variable, or a function, or an algorithm, is not going to make any sense to them, since those are just 'techniques' into achieving something. The reason kids love Scratch is because it makes programming/coding much more practical and real.

When I was thinking about what else could we use to teach kids how to code, I had my epiphany when I thought about the fact that Kids already solve complex programming problems everyday!!!

It's called MATHS.

London Hack the Curriculum - focused on for key Stage 3 Computing curriculum (11-13 years old kids)

Check this out, https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/hack-the-curriculum-and-include-birthday-celebration-tickets-15351043384

This looks like an really interesting event, and a great way to help to shape the next generation of coders :)

I'm planning to attend, so if you have any good ideas on how we (OWASP or AppSec industry) can help, let me know and I'll relay those ideas

I'm delivering "Writing Secure Java EE Web Applications Training Course" (June 19,20 in London)

Next month I'm teaching a 2 day training course for JBI here in London, on the topic of "Writing Secure Java EE Web Applications Training Course"

As the description mentions (see below), this is going to be a highly interactive course, where I will customise the course depending on the attendees experiences, knowledge and focus.

The cost is £1,500 GBP and if you are interested, you can use the form on this page or ping me directly (so that I put you in touch with the right guys at JBI)

Here is the blurb I wrote for this delivery:

PDF with (draft) Exam of OWASP Top10 questions

On the topic of exams and certificates, JBI Training wants to offer their clients some kind of certificates, so I'm helping them to figure out how to do it.

The first step was to have something to ping JBI's developer community with (i.e former students) so I pointed Nigel Laurens to the OWASP Exams project and he created this pdf (embedded bellow) to kickstart things.

Try F# online (using Silverlight)

Just noticed the http://www.tryfsharp.org/ which looks really good:

Teaching kids how to code - UK's CodeClub

CodeClub looks like a great way to be involved in the UK in teaching kids how to program (which I believe to be very important).

The first lessons seem to use Scratch from MIT.