Emiliano De Laurentiis's blog

Most of our lives we learn specifically what we need to achieve our goals. As children, we learn how to crawl, walk, and talk when we are physically ready to do so and when our brains are sufficiently developed to take on the task. Even so, we will only attempt something new, like the precarious act of walking, when we are motivated to do it. Babies start to crawl to get to something that they want, their mother and her milk, for example, a shiny toy, or perhaps something to explore. Similarly, we learn to talk to get what we want.

Since the early days of computers, many of us dreamed of how computers were going to revolutionize education. We didn’t know exactly how it was going to work, but we knew that the “personal” computer made it possible to individualize education. In learning, one size does not fit all, so individualized education is the “holy grail” of education! Industrialization brought us mass education, essential to building an educated workforce, but today’s workforce requires specialization and skills that are way beyond group-think. 

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This article is about the value of programming as a teaching tool not to teach programming, but rather as a medium that students use to illustrate their understanding of a concept. For example, if a student can program a computer to draw circles using basic trigonometric functions, then the student understands the concept of a circle at a very fundamental level. If a student develops a simulation that models the economic functions of a city, then that student has learned some important lessons about such an economy.