[noonat]

In my years of mentoring and tutoring, I've run into a number of students of programming (and, indeed, teachers) with the same problem.

Programming is about problem solving first, and teaching programming is about teaching someone to look at a problem analytically, and how to use an abstract flow of logic to solve a problem, and how to diagnose issues with your own logic when things go wrong. It's about critical thinking. It's about attention to detail.

It's about all of these things first, and about slapping keys second. But too many people see learning programming as learning the act of typing code, and focus too much on rote memorization of syntax, or teaching tools instead of thinking. Someone should come out of a course saying that they learned how to think in this new way as programmer, not that they learned a new programming language.

[j2kun]

The worst is when I spend five minutes helping a student understand what the problem is, and then he concludes by asking me what he should type.