The role of technology in the economy and society is growing, so IT specialties are now especially popular. But even if you are very drawn to this area, you should still not forget how difficult it can be to become a professional. After all, you will have to study constantly - at school, at a university, at online courses.
I will tell you what to take care of when choosing a training format, what difficulties a teenager may encounter in courses and how to distinguish a good program from a weak one.
Choose Training Format
How to navigate the diversity of training programs? It is important to set a clear goal and understand what you want to get in the end. And also - to evaluate your own skills of self-organization and time management.
If you know what time management is and are not afraid of difficulties, then you can learn the programming language from a good book or articles on the Internet and consolidate knowledge in practice, sometimes involving an experienced specialist to explain difficult points.
If there is no fundamental need for a university diploma, you can choose any offline or online course. Classical universities rarely give full in-depth knowledge of any programming language, more often the program includes familiarization with many of their options and the differences between them.
Short-term courses also have their own features. Most often, the program is compiled taking into account several levels of ownership of programming: initial, medium, advanced. When choosing a specific program, you need to correctly compare knowledge with how deeply the material is worked out in the classroom.
What can go wrong
Learning programming requires perseverance, self-organization and patience. It is quite real to study independently: there are many high-quality books, articles on the Internet, and you can also find a good mentor.
But for young students, the best solution is still organized offline courses. Their advantage in collectiveness: work takes place in groups, the student begins to understand not only mistakes, but also the shortcomings of classmates, and team work strongly motivates and pushes for development.
But courses may also be imperfect. Here are the main disadvantages:
- The complexity of tasks is growing sharply. Often simple and banal tasks are quickly replaced by hard-to-reach material. At the same time, a huge layer of medium-complexity tasks is missed
- There are no tools and skills to quickly find errors. This can be a problem for experienced specialists, and for beginners - a serious obstacle to the goal, and even the reason for abandoning it
- A lot of theory with a small amount of practice. Programming is useless to study on paper, the main thing is to write code directly and consolidate knowledge on real tasks
How to make sure the courses are really good
Classes for adults and children are built in different ways. If the first more often needs a "concentrate" of knowledge, because they are busy people and they do not have time for long courses, then for a younger audience the duration of the program fades into the background.
What's most important about adolescent programming?
- Interesting Feed
Knowledge should be taught so that students are not bored, even if they have to solve the cases on the same topic several times in a row - Simple, but with complexity, material
The material should be simple enough, but at the same time contain new tasks that the child is unable to perform without the help of the courses - Strong mentor
Regardless of the chosen training format (online or offline), a personal mentor is very important. This role can be taken by a teacher or an experienced practicing programmer - the main thing is that he is interested in real learning by the student
In most cases, the mentor accelerates the learning process, notices errors, gives non-obvious advice. In programming, it is the explanation and demonstration of solutions that play an important role. The instructor will help to cope with the fear inherent to newcomers who are just beginning to study a vast and complex subject. The only way to overcome this fear is to write code, regardless of the inevitable mistakes.