Podcast Transcript
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Matthew Baptist
Does it matter what programming language they start with? Should they start with Python? Should they start with Java?
Ben Ehrlich
Matt does it matter what programming language they start with?
Steven Fink
Seriously, this is your question.
Ben Ehrlich
Should they start with Python should they start with Java?
Matthew Baptist
Do you guys want to ask me that?
What programming language should I learn-
[Intro music cuts in]
Matthew Baptist
Hello, everyone and welcome to another episode of the summer tech podcast. We are once again joined by Steven Fink, the owner and founder of summer tech and the wonderful tech director, Benjamin Ehrlich and myself, Matt Baptist. So I want to start off today’s podcast by just touching briefly on a current event that we saw in the news today. The popular program Scratch, which is used by a lot of programs in order to teach you know, get very young kids exposed to coding and get them started, was just banned in China. And so I just wanted to kind of read the room. How do we feel about that Scratch ban in China?
Steven Fink
Reading this article. This article isn’t about the validity of Scratch, this was a political thing.
Matthew Baptist
which is kind of funny with an educational tool like that. It only hurts yourself. Right? If the if the tool is effective to for teaching.
Ben Ehrlich
Is it effective, though?
Steven Fink
Well, I’d say the, you know, it’s a fine program. And we’re glad it’s here. It’s just, you know, certainly where a lot of kids first even find out what coding is, or you know, wrap their heads around the concept, but it’s nothing we’ve ever taught because we’ve always felt that it, it just didn’t hold the value of what it was we were trying to teach. We just felt it didn’t really teach kids how to build as much as how to use scratch. You know, it’s great for understanding concepts. But I’d say once they hit eight or nine, they’re ready to move on to, you know, typing it all in and understanding everything they’re typing.
Matthew Baptist
What were the first programming languages that were offered at summer tech.
Steven Fink
So we used to just call it code. I believe it’s been going on to our 20th summer. We were teaching Java, we were teaching web, we were teaching a course that dealt with a lot of basic, like Microsoft products and like Word and Excel. We had a Visual Basic course, we did that as well. And then we quickly started adding new things and trying all kinds of things. But Java was the cool language at the time. I don’t think I’d even heard of Python at that point.
Matthew Baptist
And so it was Java from the beginning, not c++?
Steven Fink
It’s been so long. I’m not even sure I feel like it was Java. I feel like c++ came a little bit later.
Matthew Baptist
So we have mentioned Visual Basic. We’ve mentioned c++, Java. Were there any other programming languages that we’ve tried offering as sort of a main language that we don’t currently offer?
Steven Fink
Languages? Well, c++, which ended about what four or five years ago
Ben Ehrlich
Is roller coaster language?
Steven Fink
We had a roller coaster physics course, that several animation courses in different mediums are laser different programs. There’s probably things I’m forgetting. There’s our, you know, famous machinima course.
Matthew Baptist
Some would say infamous machinima course.
Ben Ehrlich
Our world infamous course, yes.
Matthew Baptist
So how did we end up landing on the current two coding languages that we teach?
Ben Ehrlich
How did we end up on those languages, Matt?
Matthew Baptist
Yeah, Matt, how did we get to it? How did Python become our most popular class?
Steven Fink
So I remember Python was not something when I was a camper at summer tech all those years ago, Python was not a programming language that was offered. I started my first weeks at summer tech, I was a c++ student. And the only options were c++ and Java. And Python was something that, you know, I and a couple other senior counselors at the time, eventually had learned on our own and another senior counselor and I feel eventually, you know, I got on the staff. I was no longer taking c++ as a student and Phil and I brought up the idea of teaching Python to Steve and got the Go ahead. And we ended up teaching a group of about seven kids. I think our first week, I remember Phil was working with beginners, I was working with two intermediate student two to three intermediate students. And it was very successful. And so over time, we moved away from c++ and Python and Java became the two languages that we were focusing on. And then Python really became what we started to recommend to new programmers that were coming in. And so we got a little bit more focused and intentional with our recommendations and how we were thinking about those programs and realized that Python had a lot to offer.
Steven Fink
You know, I think that anyone who’s listening should understand how this company works, and I have no problem letting everybody know that I’m not the coder in this family. Sure, I’ve done a little bit here and there actually coated in fourth grade, which is what 1970 something and on Commodore Computer learning basic, right, “10 print hello 20 go to 10” and, and building things there. So I’ve known about coding a long time. I remember me and my buddy on Commodore 64, he was doing machine language, which was really just a series of codes just like a string of numbers, strings of numbers that you would put in eventually you just give this cool game. But what’s been so fantastic about this company is people like yourself Matt, like all the kinds of people who have come up to me and said, What if we did this? Could we try this? This is big. Now this is popular. And I think my job really eventually became at least when it comes to content, “Let’s try it.” You know, I listened to what you say I see the merits. And so let’s try it and see what happens. And from that, we have almost everything that we have now. Animation came that way. Obviously Python, machinima came that way. What’s the other I was just thinking of?
Matthew Baptist
3d modeling.
Steven Fink
Yeah, 3d modeling. Another one. So this place is a real kind of cooperative workshop in a lot of ways where there’s no one out there going, “well let’s find the best educational package written by this PhD and this educator”, and now we’ve just created it from the ground up and watched it work and and molded as it went. And we saw our kids taking to this and they’re learning more. And I remember I think it was you, Matt, that came to me a long time ago, like six, seven years ago and said, you realize these kids are going, you know, doing their whole first semester of college in about three weeks, and that’s when it first hit me like I had no idea. I always was interested in running an amazing camp. So this, this whole place just runs with a different MO that we’re really proud of.
Ben Ehrlich
Have fun and learn something one could say.
Matthew Baptist
It’s that prescient motto. So I think there’s sort of two closely related questions or kind of follow ups that come from that. And the first one of them is, how did the trend of you know, we talked about how the bar was raised with the level at which we taught coding as well as our other classes, but as we’ve kind of focused in on coding here, how did that process of coming from maybe a little bit more loose where we were 10 or 11 years ago to consistently to the level at which we teach now and everything’s formalized here happen?
Steven Fink
Well, for me, I think it had everything to do with the leadership program. In my very first summer-this was actually the summer before summer tech started when we were still American Computer Experience and before that company went out of business and summer tech was started. And I was directing that camp, which we can talk about another episode, I identified these 3 15 year old camp leaders that these were the most popular and fun guys that really just made camp run outside of our staff, that other campers really gravitated towards them, and I said, “do you guys want to come back next year and be CITs?” And they did and they were instrumental and a big part of our staff. And other people said, “I want to do that.” And so little by little, we started adding more kids as they were growing up and showing that they were mature enough to handle this and they had the skills to teach. We gave them a chance to see if they can teach, and little by little our classes got smaller and smaller and smaller just because they could, because we had so much staff, until eventually we kind of landed at three to one and while it may not be the most economical way to run a business, the results were off the charts. Hence, when you came to me and said, you realize we’re taking kids from here to here in three weeks. So that’s when really why coditum got going because we no longer were just a summer camp, fun slash educational program, we became legitimate in how we taught. We were like, Well, why isn’t everybody else doing this? I’m doing this. And to this day, and I’ve been in this business now since the mid 90s, to this day, I still haven’t seen anybody take our approach of just simply putting people with people and teaching and letting them learn rather than putting them in this box and saying, Well, here’s the thing I want you to teach. And here’s the script. That doesn’t work. And you know, if you don’t get to know people, you don’t get to have experiences and you know, you guys have taught a lot of people have taught now at summer tech and coditum and I think that every staff member having that teaching forced them to grow up and become more mature and get better communication skills. And just more confidence, you know, we see a lot of kids come in without a lot of confidence and eventually leave and head off to college or beyond just a different person. And we’re not the ones who made them confident, but we certainly opened a door for them and an opportunity that they might not have gotten at such a young age. And I think that’s been the best thing we’ve done overall, is create that opportunity.
Matthew Baptist
Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think what you were saying about the leadership program, and how we saw sort of generation after generation of staff come in and realize that they wanted to raise the bar, they they had an example set for them and they had not just a cool or an amazing camp experience, but they had a great learning experience and they wanted to share that same joy and interest they got from what they were doing to another student and I think it was really cool getting to having someone who was a counselor at that time instead of just a director being a part of that cohort and seeing that change. And that attitude was a really cool thing, I think to kind of grow up in. So just to focus in on the sort of the other question, or the other idea that we’re looking at, was, how did we land on these two sort of current programming languages that we’re teaching? And for someone who is starting to code? Should what kind of doesn’t matter what programming language they start with? Should they start with Python? Should they start with Java?
Ben Ehrlich
Matt? Does it matter what programming language they start with? Should they start with Java?
Steven Fink
You just answer your own question. I’ll preface it by saying towards the end there were three languages that are being taught a camp the two main ones for a while were Java and c++. Then Python came in. And it was sort of this new language. And some people were sort of skeptical, and then it started to grow. And then eventually I believe it was you who would say, “well, we don’t need c++”. Why?
Matthew Baptist
Yeah, so that’s a great question. I actually think it was something a lot of students were wondering about and didn’t get the chance to get the question answered. So I’m happy to just sort of explain the full reasoning.
The secret is finally coming out.
Matthew Baptist
The secrets finally coming out exactly. This is the hidden summary process. What we were finding with specifically with our c++ course, was that in order to kind of give them a generalizable skill set in order to sort of focus more on building the problem solving concepts and getting them to a place where they could take that and apply that to things that weren’t c++, you almost had to teach c++ the wrong way. You almost had to teach them in a way that didn’t take advantage of like what real c++ programming and some of the tools that existed in there that you would actually be using if you’re using it to do things. So that’s why we moved away from c++. Ultimately, we have found Python to be an extremely effective language for beginners for a couple of reasons. And I think it has many, many strengths as a language. But first and foremost is that the syntax has a bit of a simpler learning curve. So you can get started with learning programming in Python. And you’re able to spend more of your time focusing on the important stuff, which is how do you break down problems and then write code to solve those problems, as opposed to just did I drop a semi colon here or, you know, am I missing XYZ set of parentheses or things like that, and those things are still present in Python, and you will still build those skills to but your introduction and the speed with which you start to pick everything up. It’s just a little bit more natural with Python. So that’s a big advantage of it, as well as the fact that it is very generalizable. You’re working with you know, a very fully powerful programming language and you can take those skills and translate them to other domains. So Python has has very quickly become our sort of tool of choice to recommend to beginners.
Ben Ehrlich
The programing language I should learn to start coding, you would say?
Matthew Baptist
Yeah, absolutely.
Steven Fink
At any age?
Matthew Baptist
I think Python is a great language for both youth and adults. I mean, I can say in my own life, if I need to write a program to do something that is, for more any any kind of personal project or any sort of quick task that I need to accomplish, I’m using Python for it. It’s got tons of libraries extensions, to do anything you really need to do.
Steven Fink
Can you think of a reason that you should start with Java?
Matthew Baptist
Yeah. So Java is a great language. I think it has some of the same issues of learning c++ and that it’s got a bit of a steeper learning curve. And a couple other things. But Java has a number of advantages, that it is going to be a standardized language that you’re going to see in high school classes that you’re going to see in college classes. So if you are in high school already, and you are potentially looking at AP Computer Science on the horizon, or if you are maybe heading into college and are just looking to get a head start on programming, if that’s something you might be interested in Java is a great language to pick up for those reasons and you can absolutely start there. It’s also a very widely popular language and in use still in the industry, and the the skills that you will build, learning Java will transfer to a number of other very useful.
Matthew Baptist
Thanks, everyone for tuning in to another episode of the summer tech and codium podcast. If you want to contact us, you can reach us at [email protected]. Until next week, have fun learn something,
