Art, AI, and Developer Advocacy With Kirk Kaiser
## Metadata
- Author: [[The State of Developer Education]]
- Full Title: Art, AI, and Developer Advocacy With Kirk Kaiser
- Category: #podcasts
- URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/a8b596e4-f0c2-44c8-94dd-2998135a8f34
## Document Notes
## Highlights
- **Encourage Play in Education**
- Give learners space to fail and experiment without fear of grades.
- Motivating projects aligned with personal interests sustain persistence in learning programming.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Yes, so I think it's kind of this discipline wherein you have a set of tools. The tools are computer science, right? Like we literally have data structures, we have programming languages, your software, either fundamentally works or it doesn't. And there is a very steep learning curve in general. I tried probably six or seven times to learn how to program starting with C++ and C. And trying was a very valiant effort, but it just didn't stick. And I think what you need to do is you need to give yourself the space to fall. You need to give yourself the space to do things that don't count, right? Like, oh, I just changed a line on this program. That's it. That's actually amazing. That is how you start to model in your head how programs actually work. And so I think the focus on grading, on rigor, rather than what would you like to do, is really kind of the beginning of the problem. Because there's this abstract requirement out of you. You need to do the work, turn in the grade, and be graded. Versus what's interesting to use skateboarding? Oh, build a skateboard robot. What's interesting to you? Painting? Oh, build a painting robot that gets paint all over the place. You have a much better motivation to keep getting back up when you have that angle of what you want to build. And I think one of the things that's tough as a younger person or a beginner is you don't know what's possible. And really, the answer is literally anything. You just need to stumble your way there. And ([Time 0:36:31](https://share.snipd.com/snip/51790aa0-b577-409a-b6da-2d8125f2f759))