How to Learn Programming

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Video Script

Before we launch into the course itself, I wanted to take a few minutes to share some information with you regarding what we know about how students learn to program. This isn’t just anecdotal evidence from computer science teachers like me, but theories and research from education researchers who study how humans learn new skills and abilities throughout their lives.If I had to summarize all of this information in as few words as possible, I’d simply say “do the work.” Learning to program is difficult, and the only way to really get good at it is through constant practice and learning. However, that greatly oversimplifies the information that I want to share, and I’m hoping that you’ll find some helpful takeaways from this video that you can incorporate into your learning process.

Before I begin, I want go give all the credit to Nathan Bean for developing this information as part of his CIS 400 course. He graciously allowed me to use his hard work here, and I encourage you to check out his original version, which is available at the URL shown on this slide.

The statement “do the work” is a shorter version of a very common quote from educators, which is “the person doing the work is the person doing the learning.” I couldn’t find a solid reference for who said it first, so I’ll just attributed it to various educators throughout time. This really highlights one of the biggest struggles many students run into when learning to program. There are so many guides online, and the answer to many simple problems can be found through a quick Google search. You can just copy and paste the code, and then your program works. However, did you really learn how to write that program and what it does, or just how to find a quick answer? While this may be a useful tactic from time to time, if you rely too much on other people to do your coding, you really won’t learn it yourself. This is just like learning to shoot free throws on a basketball court or beating your best time in a speedrun - you can’t just watch someone do it and expect to do it yourself (believe me, I’ve tried). So, if you aren’t doing the work, you aren’t really learning.

Next, let’s address a major myth in computer science. I’ve heard this many times: “some people are just natural born programmers, and others simply cannot learn to program.” And yes, on the surface, it may appear to be this way. Some students just seem to have a knack for programming, and you may sit and struggle and not really get anywhere. However, there is no innate skill or ability that makes you good at programming.

Instead, let’s reframe what it means to learn programming. At its core, programming is learning to write steps to solve problems in a way that a computer can perform those steps. That’s really what we are doing when we learn programming.

So, we must focus on learning how to write those steps with the proper exactitude and precision so that they make sense, and we must understand how a computer functions to be able to program that computer effectively. So, when you see someone who is good at programming, it’s not because they are good at some esoteric skill that you’ll never have - they just know how to express their steps properly and know enough about how a computer works to make their program do what they want. That’s really it! And, to be honest, after a single semester of learning to program, you’ll have all the skills you need to do both of those things! If you know how to make conditionals, loops, functions, and use simple variables and arrays, that’s really all you need. Everything else that comes after that is just refining those skills to make your programs more powerful and your coding more efficient.

So, how do we learn these skills? Well, there are a couple of important pieces we need to make sure are in the right place first. For starters, we need to have the correct mindset. Many times I’ll see students struggle to learn how to program, and they’ll say things like what you see on this slide. “Its too hard.” “I don’t understand this.” “I give up.” Statements like this are the sign of a “fixed mindset,” and they can be one of the greatest blockers preventing you from really learning to program. Just like learning any other skill, you have to be open to instruction and willing to learn, or else you’ve failed before you even started.

Instead, we want to focus on building a growth mindset. In the TED talk by Carol Dweck that is linked below this video, which I encourage you to watch, she talks about the power of “yet.” We can turn these statements around by simply adding positive power of “yet” - “I don’t understand this yet.” “I love a good challenge.” “I’ll keep trying until I get it.” Going into a programming project with a mindset that is open to growth and change is really an important first steps. When I feel like I’m getting a fixed mindset, I like to think about how difficult it would be to teach a child to tie their shoes if they don’t want to learn. As soon as I realize that, it is pretty easy to recognize that same problem in myself and work to correct it.

So, once we have our growth mindset, how do we actually learn to program? To understand that, let’s dive a bit into the world of educational theory and the work of Jean Piaget. Piaget was a biologist and psychologist who studied how young children acquired new knowledge, and he helped pioneer the concept of Constructivism, one of the most influential philosophies in education. You can read more about Constructivism in the links below this video.

One particular thing that Piaget worked on was a theory of genetic epistemology. Epistemology is the term for the study of human knowledge, so genetic epistemology is the study of the origins, or genesis, of that knowledge. Put more clearly, it’s the study of how humans create new knowledge. This concept was inspired by research done on snails - he was able to prove that two previously distinct species of snails were actually the same by moving snails from one habitat to another and observing how they modified their behaviors and how their shells grew to match the snails in the new habitat. Put clearly, the snails displayed an altered behavior based on their environment. They tried to exist in equilibrium with their environment by adapting their behaviors to fit what they now experienced in the word.

Piaget suspected that something similar happens when humans try to learn something - the brain tries to adapt itself to maintain an equilibrium in its environment, which in this case is the existing knowledge it contains. So, when the brain is exposed to new ideas, it must somehow adjust to account for that new information. Piaget proposed two different mechanisms for how this occurs: assimilation and accommodation. In assimilation, new knowledge can be added to existing structures in the brain. For example, if you are exposed to a new color, such as periwinkle, you can see that it falls somewhere between blue and violet, two colors you already know. So, you can assimilate that new knowledge into the existing knowledge without a major disruption to your mental structure of existing colors. Accommodation, on the other hand, happens when your brain must radically adapt to new information for which no existing structures exist. This can be very difficult, and can lead to a lot of struggle and frustration when trying to get “over the hump” on a new subject. Think about learning algebra or a new language for the first time - you really don’t have anything you can use to help understand this new material, so you just have to keep at it until those new structures are formed in your brain.

Unfortunately, to achieve accommodation, your brain simply has to build brand new structures to store and represent all of this new information, and that process is difficult and takes time. Put another way, it takes significant stimulus, usually in the form of doing homework, struggling with difficult problems and wrestling with the new information to try and understand it all, to create enough disequilibrium in your brain that, coupled with a growth mindset, will allow accommodation to occur. However, when all the pieces are in the right place, and you work hard and have a growth mindset, then…

EUREKA! The structures will form, and you’ll get over that huge hurdle, and things will start falling into place. It may not happen all at once, but it does happen (you’ve probably had it happen to you several times already - think about some eureka moments from your past - were they related to learning a new skill?). Of course, there’s a good chance that your brain might form a few incorrect structures in the process, so you’ll have to overcome those as you continue to learn. I still struggle to spell some words because my brain formed incorrect structures when I was still learning. But, if you continue to work hard and be open to learning, you’ll eventually sort those errors out as well.

Let’s look at one other concept in education, which is called stage theory. Piaget identified four stages that children go through as they learn to reason about the world. Those four stages are shown on this slide. In the sensorimotor stage, the child is just using their senses to interact with the world, without any real understanding of what will happen when they perform an action. This is best represented by babies and toddlers, who touch and taste everything in their surroundings. Next, the preoperational stage is represented in young children as they start to think symbolically about the world, using pictures and words to represent actions and objects. They then progress to the concrete operational stage, where they can begin to think logically and understand how concrete events happen. They can also start to think inductively, building the general principles of the world from their specific experiences. For example, if they observe that cooked spaghetti is better than raw spaghetti, they might reason that other foods like potatoes are better cooked than raw. Finally, the last stage is the formal operational stage. This stage is represented by the ability to work fully with an abstract work, formulating and testing hypotheses to truly understand how the world works and predict how new items will work before experiencing them firsthand.

Many later researchers built upon this model to show that adults learn in much the same way. They also discovered that the stages are not rigid, and you may exhibit behaviors from multiple stages at any given time. This is called the “overlapping waves” model, and is shown here in this diagram. So, as you learn new skills, you may be at the operational stage in some areas, but still at the preoperational stage in other areas. This explains why some concepts may make sense while others don’t for a while - you just have to keep going until it all fits together.

So, how can we apply all of this information to programming? One theory comes from the work of Lister and Teague, who proposed a developmental epistemology of computer programming. Put another way, they applied this theory to computer science education, and gave us a unique way to think about the different stages of learning to program.

At the sensorimotor stage, we’re just getting the basics. So, when given a piece of code and asked to trace what it does, we still make lots of errors and get the answer incorrect. If we want to get a program to work ourselves, it usually involves a lot of trial and error, and many times when it does end up working we don’t even know exactly why it worked that time, but we’re building up a baseline of information that we can use to construct our mental model of how a computer works.

As we progress into the preoperational stage, we become better at tracing code correctly, but we still struggle to understand what the program itself does. We see each line of code as a separate instruction, but not the entire program. A great analogy is reading a recipe that calls for flour, water, salt, and yeast. Will it make bread? Biscuits? Pie crust? We’re not sure yet, but at least we can recognize the ingredients. To solve problems at this stage, we typically will randomly adjust pieces of our code that we don’t quite understand and see what it does, trying to form a better idea of the importance of each line in the code.

Eventually, we’ll get to the concrete operational stage. At this stage, we can construct our own programs, but many times we are simply piecing together parts that we’ve used before and performing some futile patches and bugfixes as we refine the program. We can also work backwards to figure out what a program does from execution results, but we still aren’t very good at deducing the results from the code itself. However, we’re starting to work with abstraction, though we tend to simplify things to a level that we are more comfortable with.

Finally, we’ll reach the formal operational stage. At this stage, we can comfortable read and understand code without executing it, quickly seeing what it does and how it works without fully tracing it ourselves. We can also start to form hypotheses for how to build new programs and code, and reason about whether different approaches would work better or worse than others. This is the goal stage for any programmer! Once you have reached this stage, then you’ll feel totally at home working in code and developing your own programs from scratch.

So, how can we enable ourselves to be the best learners we can be? There is lots of interesting research in that area, best summarized in the book “The New Science of Learning” that is linked below this video. Let’s go through a few of the big concepts.

First, getting ample and regular sleep is important, because it allows your brain to build those knowledge structures we discussed earlier and store the memories from the day in long-term storage. Without enough sleep, your brain is unable to process memories offline and make them ready for retrieval later on, an important step in learning. Also, consuming large amounts of caffeine or alcohol can disrupt your sleep patterns, so keep that in mind before you pour that next cup of coffee or go out partying. You can also take advantage of modern technology to help you track your sleep - most smart watches and smartphones today can help with that!

Likewise, regular exercise is important to both your physical and mental health. When you exercise, especially aerobic exercise that gets your heart rate up, your body releases neurochemicals that help your brain cells communicate. In addition, just getting up and moving around regularly helps keep your body healthy, so take regular breaks, and consider getting a standing desk for some extra benefits.

Research also shows that engaging your senses is an important part in learning. This is why we, as teachers, try to vary our lessons with pictures, videos, activities, and more. It is also the basis of the cognitive apprenticeship style of learning that we use, which you can learn more about in the links below this video. We show you the code we are writing, engaging your sense of vision, while talking about it so you are also listening, and then you are writing your own version, using your sense of touch. You can build upon this by using your senses while you learn by taking notes during a lecture video, building concept maps, and even printing out and writing on your code and these lecture scripts. All of these processes help engage different parts of your brain and make it that much easier to build new knowledge structures.

Looking for patterns is another important way to understand programming. There are many common patterns in computer programs, such as using a for loop to iterate through an array, or an if-else statement to determine if a particular variable is set to a valid value. By recognizing and understanding those patterns, we can more quickly understand new programs that use slightly different versions of the same code. Humans are naturally very good at pattern recognition, and it is one of the reasons why we see the same code structures time and time again - not because they are the only way to accomplish that goal, but because that structure is commonly used across many programs and therefore is easier to understand.

There is quite a bit of research into how memories are formed and how we can adjust our studying habits to take advantage of that. For example, cognitive science shows that the parts of our brain responsible for memory creation are active up to one hour after a learning experience has ended, such as a lecture video or activity. So, instead of jumping to the next task, you may want to take a little while to reflect on what you just did and let it sink in before moving on. Likewise, to build strong memories, it is important to constantly recall the memory or use the skills you’ve learned to strengthen their structures in the brain. This is why teachers like to throw in a few questions from a previous exam or quiz every once in a while - it helps strengthen those structures by forcing you to recall information you’ve learned previously. On the other hand, many students try to “cram” a bunch of information right before an exam, only to forget it soon after because it wasn’t recalled more than once. As you progress further, we’ll continue to come back to concepts you’ve already learned and build upon them, a process called elaboration that helps reinforce what you’ve already learned while building new, related knowledge.

Finally, it is important to remember that we must give our brains the space it needs to focus on the task at hand. Multitasking while learning, such as watching YouTube or Twitch, chatting with friends, or listening to a lecture video while coding can all reduce your brain’s ability to form strong memories and do well. In fact, research shows that individuals who try to multitask tend to make 50% more errors and spend 50% more time on both tasks. So, instead of giving yourself distractions, try to find things that will help you focus better - there are some great playlists online for music without lyrics that can help you focus or code better, and you can easily mute notifications on your phone and on your computer for an hour or so while you work.

So, let’s summarize what we’ve covered here. First, and most importantly, remember that you can learn to program, just like the many students who have done it before you. However, it can be difficult and frustrating at times, and it will take lots of hard work on your part to make it happen. That means that you’ll need to read and write a lot of code before it really starts to make sense. In short, you must do the work to learn to program.

That said, you can help make the process easier by getting good sleep, exercising regularly, and engaging fully with all of the content in the course. That means you’ll need to take your own notes, maybe draw some diagrams, and annotate code you write and code you read to help you understand it. While you are working, try not to multitask so you can focus. If you are given some code to include in your program, don’t copy/paste it - rewrite it, and make sure you completely understand what each line does. Finally, take some time to read code written by others! GitHub is a great place to discover all sorts of code and see how others write code. If you want to write good poetry you have to read lots of good poetry, and the same goes for coding.

With that in mind, I hope you are able to make the best of this course and continue to develop your programming skills. If you are interested in this topic and would like to know more about things you can do to be a better learner, let us know! As you can imagine, teachers like me love to talk about this stuff, so don’t be afraid to ask. Good luck!