Teaching Kids to be Independent

General Discussions
#1

My time at the Canada Wide Science Fair taught me a really simple thing, that 70% kids are honestly uneducated and get adults to do allot of work for them. This is partly because the adults feel they should to all the work, but it’s also because the kids let them. The fair is extremely competitive, with almost a million dollars in cash and scholarships. One project was talking about curing X type of cancer with X radioactive isotope of an element. I asked the girl what the half-life of X element was, she didn’t know what that was. Turns out, she won a gold medal, and a scholarship to one of the biggest schools in the country.

There was a rare time I found a person in the fair that could answer every question I asked about their project and understood every aspect of what they were doing (There were some kids who apparently didn’t know what their own code did… :(). This is mainly because their parents were very experienced mechanical, software, and biochemistry engineers, and felt they should have “guided” their kids to do some kind of work. There’s no doubt that it was very rare to find a project where there wasn’t 4-5 different adults who “guided” the kids to success.

The point I’m trying to make, is that there’s allot of kids who didn’t do any of the work on their project. They’re being treated more as a poster child, and the real work was done by skilled professionals. The whole point of the fair isn’t to merely get kids into science, but to make them do the work themselves and promote real independence, that’s real education. Which I haven’t seen very often in the fair, and when I did is was pretty minuscule.

At my regional science fair, I was the only high school student who had entered in the past 3 years. I may be taking a job for summer camp to teach kids how to program robots, manage databases, and do game development. I really need advice from some of you guys on how to teach kids to work independently let their interests drag them towards some kind of hobby, because the most I hear from people around here is their hobby is generally “Facebook and Netflix”.

TL;DR: Canada Wide Science Fair didn’t have many passionate kids who knew what they were talking about, at my Regional Science Fair I was the only highschool student there for 3 years. I may be taking a job towards teaching kids a bunch of cool computer science stuffs, how can I make sure they take up a hobby in it and teach them to be independent?

#2

Speaking from experience, I grew to hate most of the activities my parents forced me to do, and found myself enjoying programming in spite of the fact that they didn’t like me spending so much time using computers (“Get off the computer and watch some TV for a while instead!”).

Teaching people to be independent in their learning is kind-of impossible. Funnily enough, independence is something you have to learn on your own.

Motivation is the key. If you can get them motivated enough you don’t even have to teach them yourself. But make sure they know you’re available if they need to ask some questions or get a push in the right direction.

#3

Great, now I have to teach them recursion too…

A eagerness to learn something that interests them should be motivation itself, but the problem is that this summer camp is quite odd, it’s almost like a daycare. But for older kids. I could just tell them to type these things in the computer and a large red box appears, but they already seen me do it, is the problem. There are small things like competitions I could put together and maybe a few small prizes. Hopefully that will make them interested enough to learn to work in teams and find eachothers strengths and weaknesses.

#4

[quote]I really need advice from some of you guys on how to teach kids to work independently let their interests drag them towards some kind of hobby, because the most I hear from people around here is their hobby is generally “Facebook and Netflix”.

I may be taking a job towards teaching kids a bunch of cool computer science stuffs, how can I make sure they take up a hobby in it and teach them to be independent?
[/quote]
Well you can’t force it like Heroes said, but enabling interest is the first step. Make/show some cool demos of real stuff one can do with the concepts. Follow up with interactive examples with visual output to leverage that sweet, sweet instant gratification. Stir some friendly competition via sites like Hackerrank (also plenty of exercise for learning languages and concepts) or the codegolf.stackexchange.com challenges for anyone more ambitious. This one was fun, if involved: (it’s also multiplayer and you can host your own) http://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/25347/survival-game-create-your-wolf

Math class etc. is boring for most because it’s (usually) very dry: just rote memorization of things in the textbook in a vacuum, never any showing of what any of it could be used for.

#5

Heh. Maybe try something like the “King-of-the-Hill” challenges that occasionally pop up on StackOverflow (For example, the Wolf AI)

Competition will definitely be a great motivator.

Edit: Damn it BurntPizza. You must’ve read my mind.

#6

It’s the harsh reality that kids are “stupid”, but what age group are you talking about in particular?

I tried (note tried) to teach basic java to a group of around 15 youths, these particular youths were early school leavers that claimed they wanted to do something computer related, quite a lot of them had an interest in programming, some hardware and the odd one or two that wanted to go to college and do games development.

What a waste of time for me and the organisation. We made a few little games (rock paper scissors, tic tac toe etc), as well as basic programs that simulate bank accounts.

Half of them left because they could not be bothered to show up, the others, whenever they got stuck they would go on Facebook or some random reddit page until I noticed, then asked for help.

Turned out this was pretty common, happened with every group and I was not the first person to try.

However, there was one girl in particular that loved to be creative, she wanted to do games design and possibly programming. I put most of my attention into her, helped her as much as possible.

I gave her a road map that could get her from where she is, and onto a course that is meaningful. Told her what she needed to learn and what to expect.

She is now doing the course I did 2 years ago.

All the other kids wanted to do was go home and play games on the xbox, their parents literally just let then do fuck all with their lives.

Quite the opposite end of the spectrum, on my end the parents did not care and unfortunately, the kids will never excel in anything. In your end, the parents are pushy and controlling, so the kids will succeed but still never excel in anything.

So yeah, tldr kids are shit, just do your best and try to find the ones among the idiots and focus on them. Diamond in the rough and what not.

#7

Canada Wide Science Fair had around ages 10 - 18, so pre-teen and late-teens.

But I understand what you’re saying too. There’s of course going to be kids who are interested, and then slowly drift off from the science of computer science. But it’s like that with all education, and truly sometimes it varies on the teachers and their methods also. I’ll try to make it as fun and interesting as I can.

#8

Interesting topic, I’m also trying to figure out how to motivate students to learn.

I read once that a key way to motivate employees is to present the job as an impossible challenge that has never been done before. Then the employees rise to the challenge and over-achieve because they take pride in breaking new ground.

I think this can also work for learners because then any progress that they make proves their intelligence and self-worth to themselves, giving them the confidence to continue breaking new ground and allowing them to write-off failures as inevitable which doesn’t make them feel stupid.

I agree that competition, examples and relevance are important for effective teaching.

Learners often don’t know where to start, so it’s important to show them a simple working example.

Relating the theory back to reality helps show relevance. I remember studying trigonometry in school and hating it. Then I voluntarily studied it by myself when I found out that it can be used to calculate projectile paths in games.

I’ve also noticed that the most effective teachers interact with the class by posing questions, and budget more time for students to do problems themselves rather than making the student listen to the teacher solve problems.