hey mastodon, throw all your programming pedagogy links at me. I teach a lot of beginner programmers and I want to get better at it!
specifically the trouble I have is getting beginners from the "I understand the syntax and can modify examples" stage to the "I can model problems as programs and apply my knowledge of the language to build these programs" stage. the first stage is pretty easy and most tutorials for beginners are oriented toward that kind of literacy... the second is harder to achieve and harder to teach, and it seems like most people only reach that stage with self-directed practice
@aparrish the one thing I feel helped me throughout the whole thing is forming a mental model of the computer very early on. There was no programming involved, but the professor explained, in high level, but precisely enough, how CPU and memory interact and how this leads to breaking things into smaller steps. I feel like if you get that, a lot of the apparent magic in even higher level languages becomes less opaque.
