How can I teach a know-it-all beginner programmer?

Posted by Liran Orevi on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Liran Orevi
Published on 2009-05-15T12:08:28Z Indexed on 2010/04/07 7:53 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 245

Filed under:

teaching

|

beginner

|

teenage

I need to teach a teenage beginner programmer (private tutoring style). The problem is that despite their poor knowledge and skills, they are sure of their abilities, to the point where I find it hard to teach them "better ways".

What's the best way to tackle this?

Just to be clear what I'm talking about:

Constantly changing between tools/IDEs/libraries when it's tough.
Blind certainty that really bad designs are really very good.
Copying and pasting from the Internet, without understanding the code, and "marking" it as a project.

© Stack Overflow or respective owner

Related posts about teaching

Language+IDE for teaching high school students?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm investigating languages and IDEs for a project involving teaching high-school students (around grade 11). It will teach basics of programming as an introduction to computer science (e.g., including how numbers/strings/characters are represented, using procedures and arrays, control flow, a little… >>> More
Decisions in teaching someone else to program: language selection

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
My friend would like for me to guide her into learning programming. She's already proven enormous aptitude for thinking like a programmer but is scared of the idea of programming since in her mind it's relegated to some magical realm accessible only to smart people and trained computer scientists… >>> More
teaching my self Z/OS assembler?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
'I've interned at a company that does a lot of mainframe work. Most of my mainframe experience has been using Java and Unix System Services. I've had some experience with the ISPF interface and C but none with assembler. I’m graduating shortly and will be taking an independent study my last semester… >>> More
Testing harness for online teaching?

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I have been asked to teach an online programming course, and I am looking for a test harness especially geared to education. Some students will have significant coding experience, but others will be total newbies. The course is an introduction to software development, mostly taught in C with some… >>> More
Running an intern program

as seen on ASP.net Weblogs - Search for 'ASP.net Weblogs'
This year I am running an unpaid internship program for high school students. I work for a small company. We have ideas for a few side projects but never have time to do them. So we experiment by making them intern projects. In return, we give these interns guidance to learn, personal attentions,… >>> More

Related posts about beginner

assembly registers beginner

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
So I've been getting into a bit of assembly lately and I'm a beginner so i was wondering if someone could clarify something. I take it every process has it's own set of registers, and each thread can modify these registers right?. How then do multiple threads use the same registers without causing… >>> More
Beginner learning assembly preserving esp after function calls

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
I'm a beginner learning some assembly, when preserving the ESP register before a function call does it matter if you do it by adding or subtracting? hard to explain, consider the following mov esi, esp sub esp, 12 // on 32bit OS this would mean that there are 3 arguments to the function // push,… >>> More
I am a beginner to C and this is the dumbest question..Confused about getchar() function

as seen on Stack Overflow - Search for 'Stack Overflow'
Sorry if I am not supposed to post beginner level questions here..I am new to this site Please read the code below first I am confused about getchar() 's role in the following code.. I mean I know its helping me see the output window which will only be closed when I press enter key So getchar()… >>> More
Top 10 Reasons SQL Developer is Perfect for Oracle Beginners

as seen on Oracle Blogs - Search for 'Oracle Blogs'
Learning new technologies can be daunting. If you’ve never used a Mac before, you’ll probably be a bit baffled at first. But, you’re probably at least coming from a desktop computing background (Windows), so you common frame of reference. But what if you’re just now learning… >>> More
Would you recommend Head First Programming for someone new?

as seen on Programmers - Search for 'Programmers'
My brother is just starting out college. He's studying the same thing I am here in Bolivia; Systems Engineer which is the equivalent of what a CS degree is in the US. Being his big brother and a programmer myself I really want to guide him and give him the right material to learn and become good… >>> More