programming
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
7 points (76.9% liked)
techsupport
2990 readers
3 users here now
The Lemmy community will help you with your tech problems and questions about anything here. Do not be shy, we will try to help you.
If something works or if you find a solution to your problem let us know it will be greatly apreciated.
Rules: instance rules + stay on topic
Partnered communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
@lurch@sh.itjust.works okay, so kids can learn programming. But l want them to explore the concept even before they learn that word.
Based on your post history and behavior I would hope they don't learn it from you in your current state.
@dbx12@programming.dev why this remark ?
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
I doubt you have good teaching capabilities right now. Your behavior doesn't strike me as that of a teaching person. I cannot put a finger on it but I cannot imagine your behavior on role models and teacher figures I encountered in my life.
@dbx12@programming.dev working with scratch becomes easy with turbowarp ?
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
I have no idea about scratch, whether it's good or gets improved by turbowarp.
@dbx12@programming.dev honestly l don't know what kind of teacher figures you've come across, but with AI having invaded the market, the teaching profession would soon be wiped off the face of the planet. Only those people whose life's mission is to prepare the younger generations, only they would be able to be in the role of a teacher.
That being said, what is it that you noticed in my behaviour that makes you doubt whether l'm a good teacher or not ?
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
I've completed my education way before AI was a thing and got my academical degrees just before LLMs hit the general public, so I cannot judge how severe the influence of LLMs in the teaching world will be. I doubt it will be significant since LLMs lack one ability good teachers have and show: the ability to say "I don't know but I will find out and tell you next lesson". A LLM would rather make up some bullshit and present it as absolute fact before admitting it doesn't "know".
What I saw in my teachers and valued as role models:
- Very good grasp of their subject
- Ability to transfer knowledge from a subfield they excel in to another subfield they are not excellent
- As stated above: ability to admit lack of knowledge
- Ability to use scientific methods to prove or disprove a theory and present this process
What I haven't seen but assume based on the fact that teachers must complete academic education and earn a degree here: ability to learn a subject in self study, reading established source material, drawing conclusions from it and proving or disproving them.
Those are the standards I hold a professional teacher to. Tutors (as in other students teaching after hours) don't need to have all that obviously, but having those traits certainly improves their value as teaching person.
@dbx12@programming.dev the question that l asked you, that is what are the characteristics of a good teacher-cum-mentor, l asked the same to ChatGPT. And it came out like a hilarious dialogue between a man and a machine. I'm sharing the chain of conversation with you, just for your amusement 😄😄😄😄😄
https://codeberg.org/code_macabre/My_Notes/issues/1
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
That's honestly what I expected from an LLM. If you extract the information from all the blabbering, you basically get what I said about good teacher traits. :D
@dbx12@programming.dev making meaning out of words which are "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" is a skill in itself ;)))
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
Making meaning out of words which signify nothing is guessing at best :P
@dbx12@programming.dev So an authentic teacher must have the ability to say, " I don't know, right ?" well you ought to understand that I belong to an entirely different ecosystem. I don't deal with computers in my daily life, yet technology is something that I am using increasingly in my day to day life. Do you realise now why my questions are so weird ? Yet I must admit that I have learnt a lot about computers and Technology by chatting with AI, particularly with ChatGPT and Grok, also there is Duck AI, Gemini and Claude. I can sense when they give wrong informations, and that's when I put up my doubts as posts on platforms like these. My questions get answered by by human beings who deal with technology in their day to day life.
I dream of starting on a journey. Of creating a Digital Curiosity Club for kids. Where kids can explore the cyber universe at there own pace. Here, their curiosity would become the curriculum. Their learning method would be creating something new, which they would present in front of the local college students who are studying IT. The feedback that they get would become their progress report. Later, as they grow in confidence, they would be taken to https://www.iitkgp.ac.in/, a premier institution in our country.
What do you think of my plan and my dream ?
@lurch@sh.itjust.works
I must preface this with a disclaimer: my experience with persons from your ecosystem (based on the domain you shared) is limited to a number of persons I can count on one hand. I don't intend to make this sound racist or assume a better-than-you stance.
Mainly about the admitting lack of knowledge or ability. I feel like this is a no-go and considered shameful in your ecosystem. I've worked with colleagues with this mindset a few years and it was usually troublesome to find out they were in way over their head and if they would've asked the team for feedback early, we as a team could've avoided some delays or bad infrastructure (code design) issues. It was a good learning experience for me, I now put my early drafts to team review to avoid exactly that situation.
This may sound old fashioned, but for learning the basics, I would stick to books instead of LLMs. Just because LLMs can state untruths with absolute confidence and because you are lacking the basics, you cannot spot that. Once you have good fundamentals learning from LLMs can be helpful but I would always request sources and check them. LLMs are not magic know-it-alls, they try to distill large amounts of text into small chunks and that process can be faulty. You are already on a good way here with you trying to sense when they give false information, but as I said, without solid fundamentals you might betray yourself with a false sense of safety here.
Your plan at teaching / guiding youth in technology is good, but as I said in an earlier comment teachers and guides should be very well versed in their field, otherwise they might teach untruths. And that hurts you twice, once because students will remember you teaching something wrong with confidence and it also might devalue everything else you taught. In the students mind, the thought "but what if that thing he/she said was also wrong?" will stick. For guidance, I would look up local hacker spaces, since they are keen on sharing their knowledge. At least here that's the case.