New programming course

[Simbax]

I must admit that I'm a little bit disappointed with your overconfident answer. First you've said, that you had no success with getting kids interested than you say that team needs no help at all and know enough to make the best possible programing course.

I must admit that I'm a little disappointed that you interpreted my post as overconfidence, because I'm the most diffident person I know and I actually don't like overconfident people very much. This means my writing is bad, which I unfortunately know for a long time now and I still haven't made any improvement despite many tries. Just know that I didn't intend to make my answer look like a sign of arrogance.

You know, the question "how to teach people and get them interested" is one of the most nontrivial questions at all. There is very vivid branch of science that is constantly trying to improve methods and approaches. Maybe, if the profile of this project is rather self-learning, you should write an e-mail to one or two authors of the best self-learning books or interactive courses. They usually like to talk about their work. Don't be arrogant, this is a very difficult problem.

Yes, I know that this question is nontrivial, although I wouldn't be so sure if it is indeed "the most nontrivial" question, that is a very brave statement, but I'm not going any deeper with that, because it doesn't matter and I just like to philosophize, as my mother would say. 

The profile of this project is actually a mystery to me, since many fans actually love Colobot more because of different aspects than programming, although I believe that a viable tool for self-learning is at least one of the main goals of the project.

You say that we should write to some authors. I want to make clear that I don't criticise your idea as you can read in my previous post, I actually approve it. I've said that critique and advice from good people would be helpful. The thing is that we're not full-time developers and we're working on an open source project, where everyone does whatever one feels like doing, nothing less, nothing more, that's the nature of open source projects. And writing an e-mail or two is a task which one might not feel like doing. We don't even have a list of authors we would like to ask questions yet, we don't even have a list of concrete questions. Such e-mails are probably a material for live group discussions, as we usually do in such cases, because such e-mails are a voice not of one person, but the whole team, maybe even community.

So the point of my answer was not showing-off how great teachers we are, because we know nothing, but to gently point out, that your idea would be a great addition, but it is not necessary, because I think that if it won't happen, then it won't be the end of the project. I may be wrong, there are other people in the community who might think differently, but for me, it's not necessary. What is necessary for me is to get at least the first few chapters done in order for us to have something. Files are not set in stone, they can be changed at anytime and I'm 100% sure they will be changed myriad of times. So, I like your idea, but it is low on my priorities list at that moment in time. And my opinion is not the opinion of the whole team, mind you.

I've read the whole discussion. Filtered out the horrible part, I realized that you didn't even asked yourselves some crucial questions like: Is it more instructive to make step by step tutorials or give exercises witch demand searching for answer in docs? Or maybe at first like this and then like that. And what do you mean by "rewarding"? What is this reward? Pure knowledge? Understanding? Benefit in game? Benefit later? What's the palyer's motivation? You assume that he want to play or to learn? Does he make exercises for fun or because this game was recommended by Polish Ministry of National Education as a teaching aid for learning the basics of algorithms and object-oriented programming? He want to automate boring part of the game with robots? He likes remarkable features of robots like instant knowledge of position of everything even if it is hidden somewhere on the giant map or the great precision to use robot as measuring devices, universal compasses or just having absolute power on them? Or he don't even know yet? Should you inform him about possibilities of usage in game or let him discover them by himself?

We're only people, that's why this thread is on the forum so anyone can at anytime bring something new to the discussion. You ask those questions, someone else asks different questions, for someone else some of the questions have obvious answers, and some of them can be answered in the later stage of development. I'll try to answer your questions, of course only with my opinion, which is not the opinion of the entire team and may be not what we all agreed to.

"Is it more instructive to make step by step tutorials or give exercises witch demand searching for answer in docs?"

I think that this is quite obvious by the looking on the current sketch that we chose the latter. Well, at least I did, since I've written the whole thing (and I really hope that the proportions of authors are going to change sooner or later), and nobody else gave any objections to it, so I assume that everyone agrees or just doesn't care. Step by step tutorials are good for a cooking book, but programmers must learn how to think abstract to come up with new solutions, because, well, programming is basically about making cooking books for computers by experimenting with constantly new ovens and ingredients you've never used or seen before, and you have to know how to quickly learn to use the new ovens and how to recognise which ingredients are worthy. Maybe it's not the best comparison ever, but I hope you get my point.

"And what do you mean by "rewarding"? What is this reward? Pure knowledge? Understanding? Benefit in game? Benefit later?"

I assume that the biggest motivation is the feeling of "a-ha! it works!" after hours, days, weeks or even months of trying to figure out how to create or understand something. At least that's my motivation. Real life programmers might also be motivated by their salary <joking>. We can add more gamey rewards later, like achievements, skins, in-game money, ranking points or anything else. It's just a matter of time and people.

"You assume that he want to play or to learn?"

I assume he wants to learn by playing a game. If the player doesn't want to (self-)learn, then we lost before the race even started, unless we make the teaching aspect so sneaky, sneaky, that the player won't even notice that he's learning! That's a really hard to achieve goal though, if not impossible if we consider that programming and Computer Science just is difficult.

"Does he make exercises for fun or because this game was recommended by Polish Ministry of National Education as a teaching aid for learning the basics of algorithms and object-oriented programming?"

That's... a great question actually! It opened my eyes for another matter. I mean, how to make a game fun somehow even though a kid is forced to play it because this what a teacher or the Ministry of Education wants. You know, not only doesn't the kid want to learn, but also is forced to do it. This is a real challenge.
Well, I believe that if we improve graphics, add some cute gamey elements and make the course interesting enough by its writing, plot and gameplay, then at least some of the students should have fun. It's hard to tell, but as I said, we need to start somewhere, so we can play a little with it to see if it works and how can we improve it. Or we use the sneaky, sneaky teaching strategy as I said earlier, if we can.

"He want to automate boring part of the game with robots? He likes remarkable features of robots like instant knowledge of position of everything even if it is hidden somewhere on the giant map or the great precision to use robot as measuring devices, universal compasses or just having absolute power on them? Or he don't even know yet? Should you inform him about possibilities of usage in game or let him discover them by himself?"

We were discussing about that at some point in this thread. We must assume that the player doesn't know anything about the game, since it's totally possible to play the exercises before missions. At least for now. We could, of course, lock the programming course before the player beats the game, or unlock it after the first chapters of the game, but it's again something we can and probably will solve later, after we finally have a programming course at all and some reworked missions while we're at it.

Now, these are not simple questions. I don't expect you to answer them right away. I don't know an answer to any of them. Those questions are not all that one can pose. I know that this is very hot topic in your team so I'm maybe stirring up a hornets' nest but I think your team is really awesome and I love what you've done with Gold edition. I think that YOU are the right persons to answer those hard questions and you will. You feel this game as no one else and my suggestion to ask someone was because my questions is just one point of view. All my experience are private lessons and that's not much. (But i've managed to interest someone uninterested once) I think that there are better questions to be asked than mine and tips to get but the final decision on shape of this course is yours - Terranova Team. And' thats the best part. Just don't treat it too lightly.

Ah, that's so nice! I probably shouldn't be answering to that, because I don't feel like I did much for the project, it's our main programmers that deserve all the respect.

Also i advice to consult with real life teachers because there are things trivial for you, experienced programmers that you might not even know that can be hard at the beginning. When you understand such ideas as monads or programming in logic, old and familiar ideas might seem very natural end obvious. Only someone with huge experience with teaching actually know what is problematic for students at the beginning.

Fortunately, I'm not that advanced programmer and I'm well aware of that issue of taking some hard concepts too lightly after years of experience, so I think I am at least a little bit aware of the difficulty for our younglings, although I find myself thinking  that I made some levels too hard more often than too easy. The best person to clarify that is someone who has no or very little experience in programming at all and make one play the thing.

TBH most teachers I've met lose themselves in their difficulty awareness, but I may just be unlucky. Again, I'd be more than glad to see a good teacher helping us, but I don't know any good programming teachers (English, Math, sure, but programming I had to learn all by my own, and I had to help my classmates a lot with coding in class). Most courses on the Internet are bad and can even give you false knowledge (which is way worse than knowing nothing at all, because you spread false information and believe it's true!).

It's an open source project, anyone can help. You must understand that we see a lot of ideas before even the project happened. We get that everyone has ideas (some are bad, some are good) and wants to see them in real, but implementing them is not a trivial task and we have finite resources. You could make your idea happen more quickly by giving us a help hand, at least by listing some authors or teachers you would recommend. We all want to make this game great, but we're still only humans with our own lives and personal goals. And we're horrible at organising and prioritising, but don't say that to anyone, it's a secret.

Ugh, that's a long post, I hope that nobody has written anything significant while I was replying...

Edit:

@Simbax, I've just read your posts in shoutbox and some of my objections seem completly missed right now. I can see that you don't treat it too lightly and you are not arrogant. I'm sorry for that words.

No problem. Most of the time it's me who gets on people's nerves here Maybe because I'm often getting angry at people, who knows!