Workshops teach programming with offline, playful approach

On Wired UK:

Creative technologist Ubi de Feo has developed a series of workshops that aim to teach programming using a “tangible approach” involving bowls, boxes, M&Ms and ping pong balls.

The initiative, called “From 0 to C”, was born out of Feo’s (and his collective, Hello, Savants!) work preparing students for Arduino hardware workshops in the shortest time possible. The aim is to help people understand how a computer works and what a programming actually is without having any prior knowledge of either.

“During the past few years, as an Arduino trainer, I realised that while getting a LED to blink was fun, the real barrier lied in understanding the very simple code you needed to achieve it,” Feo says on his website.

The course is designed to help creative people visualise what’s going on inside a computer by touching and physically moving items around. This helps to demystify computing and let people realise that “everything a computer does is either very dumb or a very smart implementation of what, as humans, we are able to do”.


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