Teaching Kids SQL
Teaching kids how to program should be similar to teaching them English or a different language. I stress should. As any programmer knows, while what we do could be boiled down to a few concepts like typing, syntax, grammar, and whatnot, the reality is what really makes us be able to function well as programmers or developers is the ability to see a problem, break it up into its components and steps and then express those things in a language that a computer through a compiler can understand. Through this, we also do pattern matching, logical analysis, and we find ways to make things that we can reuse to the point that it makes us seem lazy– which we like to label efficient.
So how do you take knowledge that has been learned over time, perfected through multiple mistakes, and something that more often than not works with something that already exists and bring a kid up to speed? I’m sure there’s multiple different answers, and I could certainly buy some book(s) and evaluate it. I could do like my grandfather was taught to swim– by getting thrown into the deep end. Or I could try to bring them along on a new project that has multiple different opportunities to grow in different ways and see how that works.
And then I got the thought, why not try to document it here? Much of teaching programming is searching out answers and I could certainly write up things to do to learn different things. Maybe get help from other devs should they be looking for something similar. Or maybe just to keep record, because there’s probably many people that have tried this!
In any case, my project is going to start in SQL, and then go off into C# and PHP and who knows where else. So, it won’t hurt to have documentation somewhere, and I can at least express my design this way, so why not?
New series in programming, here we come!
