[BlindMath] Programming with young blind and visual impaired students

[kperry at blinksoft.com]

I would partially agree with this but as a Software Engineer of 30 years and
in the last 5 years an person who has been teaching blind and sighted
students alike.  I think it is less important which language  you learn and
more important that you have a goal in each step of the learning process.
Educators do not always keep up with industry and are more about getting
more students to pass what ever class they are teaching. Some schools are
still teaching out of date methodologies and languages that are not as used
now days as others.  Educators in many cases are to rushed and try to teach
using things like blocks, flow chart languages, or even languages with
little or no use once you leave the education field.  If all educators were
actual up-to-date experts in their field I would agree with this statement
but that is not the case in many instances.    One of the students I am
currently working with has a teacher that is just following a syllabus and
cannot answer questions outside of the curriculum.    

I also want to say while I don't take offense to what you said you might
want to rephrase it because it makes it sound like Blind people can't be
educators or experts in this field.

Blind people can be educators and so can people in the industry.  30 years
ago when I took college my C instructor was one of 30 programmers of Word
Perfect. He was not a normal educator but he taught me more in that
beginning C language about software engineering and design than I have
learned in latter years with more of these high level languages.  



-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of John G. Heim via
BlindMath
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2023 1:05 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics
<blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: John G. Heim <jheim at wisc.edu>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] Programming with young blind and visual impaired
students

My opinion is that you should ask educators this question, not blind people.
Find out what educators think is the best way to teach programming to
children and then figure out an accessible way to do that.



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