I'm fourteen. And I code C++ and understand everything flawlessly.
If somebody isn't learning how to code (or how to do anything, really), it's either because of one of two reasons:
a) they don't want to learn how to code
b) they're unintelligent
I'd say ~90% of kids fall into the former group. Coding is not something that you can just pick up a book and learn; it's something that takes time. It takes a hell of a lot of dedication, practice, and failure to master. Compare it to learning a spoken language; conventions of that language are likely different from English or whatever the learner's first language is, but the structure of the sentences, unless you're learning Hebrew or Yiddish, is more or less the same.
With coding, it's a mess. Nobody knows how to relate block structures to anything they've learned previously. It drives you insane for a while, but you warm up to it. It took me 3 years to finally understand many concepts that were presented to me in the many books, manuals, and docs that I perused throughout my learning experience.
And even then, I'm not done. New things are constantly to be learned, and everything I've learned I have to constantly apply to something else. If I want to learn to write GTK+ programs, I'll have to go back to a reference guide to see what several function calls actually mean.
Coding isn't impossible for kids to learn. While it is hard, it's not impossible. Start out with something like FBC or Scratch, and then give them more control through Python, which will guide them towards more complex languages like C/C++/Java. Anyone who starts teaching an 8th-grader how to code C/C++ with no prior experience, is frankly an idiot. Interest in coding is never ephemeral iff the learner is introduced to it properly.
I'm fourteen. And I code C++ and understand everything flawlessly.
If somebody isn't learning how to code (or how to do anything, really), it's either because of one of two reasons:
a) they don't want to learn how to code b) they're unintelligent
I'd say ~90% of kids fall into the former group. Coding is not something that you can just pick up a book and learn; it's something that takes time. It takes a hell of a lot of dedication, practice, and failure to master. Compare it to learning a spoken language; conventions of that language are likely different from English or whatever the learner's first language is, but the structure of the sentences, unless you're learning Hebrew or Yiddish, is more or less the same.
With coding, it's a mess. Nobody knows how to relate block structures to anything they've learned previously. It drives you insane for a while, but you warm up to it. It took me 3 years to finally understand many concepts that were presented to me in the many books, manuals, and docs that I perused throughout my learning experience.
And even then, I'm not done. New things are constantly to be learned, and everything I've learned I have to constantly apply to something else. If I want to learn to write GTK+ programs, I'll have to go back to a reference guide to see what several function calls actually mean.
Coding isn't impossible for kids to learn. While it is hard, it's not impossible. Start out with something like FBC or Scratch, and then give them more control through Python, which will guide them towards more complex languages like C/C++/Java. Anyone who starts teaching an 8th-grader how to code C/C++ with no prior experience, is frankly an idiot. Interest in coding is never ephemeral iff the learner is introduced to it properly.