thanks for creating this learning platform. I’m having a couple of beginners questions here as I’m trying to get my kids (16y/14y/12y) through the Elixir track.
I’m myself an (Elixir) software engineer but also the worst personal teacher and have limited time during the day. So I’m trying to use Exercism to get my children through the learning process. Now so far so good and they’re making some progress. One of the issues I’m perceiving in this experiment is that they often get stuck on “basics” e.g. programming terms that are implied knowledge in the exercises but not explained. Then they struggle to “double click” a term to dive deeper.
Right now I’m Saturdays reviewing their progress and try to help them getting unstuck, but I can tell that “getting stuck” without recourse during the week is really hitting the motivation breaks.
Any advice from fellow parents / tutors would be appreciated. Also if there are features in the system that could be of further help, any suggestions would be warmly welcomed.
Exercism is not entirely friendly to complete beginner to programming, it assumed you know a certain amount of programming knowledge before starting.
The elixir track has an excellent syllabus that would help a lot though, but you are still expected to do your own study.
It is just my opinion but functional programming like Elixir might not be the best starter language. For kids maybe Scratch would be a better tool to start so they can understand some of the basics first before moving on to more mature languages, and it also probably help more with motivation when they can see clearly all the interactive things that came to life due to their code.
I echo what @glaxxie says in terms of Exercism not being beginner friendly (and deliberately so).
However, I am working on a new platform at the moment that will be targeted directly for beginners. It encourages people to write real code, but is fun and visual and very much hand-holds the student. Its whole ethos is that the student should never get terminally stuck.
It won’t be launched until the end of the year though.