I have discovered that teaching programming goes much better with my fifth grade students if I take the time to teach them about all the symbols I think of as "normal" that are totally new to them.
"These are square brackets, you'll find them over the 'enter' key we use them for lists. In programming we have three kinds of brackets..."
This reduced confusion so much. And I feel a little silly for not realizing that OF COURSE they don't know what they characters are or how to type them.
I've been aware of that in math for a long time. Never ever write a new symbol without stopping to explain it.
"This is beta, it's a Greek letter we use it for angles ..."
No one ever told *me* these things. I was just tossed in the deep end but that's no reason to do that to anyone else.
@futurebird I think of stuff like this... How is it that "we" could be thrown in the deep end and just get it and problem solve (I am talking about 15 kids out of a class of 20 in the 80s and 90s) but today maybe 4 in a class of 30 can do it. What happened?
