How Do You Teach Code?

How do you teach code? this is not a rhetorical question, as I definitely don't have the answer to this. Why is it so difficult?

Context

2064 started trying to educate in the offseason this year. In terms on student knowledge and experience, we are pretty much a rookie team. We have a strong mentor based of pretty much just alumni, so very little industry experience to pull from. Education and passing knowledge is something that has been a big struggle with the team over the years. We've tried before, but it was never consistent or thought through. As a mentor group, the decision was made to put a good effort in this fall to teach the new students. We know that the first time running educational programming is going to be bad no matter what. It's very much a learning experience for everyone and we can figure out what works and what doesn't. But man code really doesn't work.

Issues

We have historically had only one programmer at any given time. When is a senior, they have pretty much always had one freshman, that they knew from some community, to pass the torch onto. This worked, until this year. As our senior programming, Parsh, left the team, there was no one to replace him. This revealed the lack of understanding on how to teach code to students in a couple of ways: Overestimating student ability and forgetting that learning your first language also means you need to learn 'code'. Fresh students do not know what an IDE is, how packages work, or even how to type like a programmer. I wanted the students to be engaged so I was like, "what's something cool they can do? Move the robot!". The problem with this is these kids had no coding knowledge. Like they didn't know how to use auto complete to import packages, and they were just blindly following my lead. I want to make it clear that this was a failure on me, not the students and I am aware of that. I set them up to fail. I just am used to teaching someone who has already been programming in some language for a few years, and I just need to transition them to java / FRC programming. So me and another mentor went back to the drawing board and they made a presentation on Intro to Java Programming. The presentation was good in terms of what it goes over, but it reminded me that code presentations will always suck. Talking about variable types and what not would make anyone's eyes glaze over, especially these 9th graders at 7:00 pm on a Tuesday night.

Solutions? Maybe?

The biggest thing is these kids need interaction with code Self and paced learning. I think coding is very much a 'go at your own pace' kind of skill. It also can only really be taught by these students getting out there and trying stuff out. I think that's how everyone learns to code, but honestly its been so long that I don't really remember how I learned my first language. I think our next lesson is going to be focused on the XRP bots. I made an exploratory codebase with some questions for them to answer, but really I don't know if this is too complicated for them already. I just want them to be doing something and not just have to sit there and talk about code. We shall see this coming Tuesday!