Today I had a student who was in sixth grade and was struggling with understanding how to work on an assignment on microbit.org. Even though I’ve never used the site, it looks similar to other UI-based block programming systems, except this student had to troubleshoot raw python code that was generated by the block program. One of the fundamental difficulties with python is indentation and I think having students understand that indentations matter.
For example, this is wrong
def function_name()
print("Hi there")But this is correctly indented with 4 spaces
def function_name()
print("Hi there")It’s quite interesting that people like us who write code every day do not think twice about this. But with kids who have not been programming this way, this would seem very odd or they scratch their head on why this is the case.
If you look up the design principle of the Python language, the author of the language focused on simplicity and readability. And while I agree indentation does make the code read better, it is a choice that is forced upon the Python programmer versus giving them the option.
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