It’s no secret that learning how to program is very hard, and
teaching it doubly so, requiring the student to wrap their head
around very unorthodox concepts. [Ubi de Feo] over at the
Amsterdam tech collective Hello, Savants! has a unique solution
for taking someone who knows nothing of programming and turning
them into a computer aficionado capable of deftly wielding
semicolons and parens. It’s called From 0 to C, and aims to
teach students programming in an environment without computers.
For his class, [Ubi] made up a lot of wooden boxes with eight
subdivisions representing the bits in a byte. By putting ping-
pong balls in each slot, [Ubi]‘s students can grasp the concept
of counting by powers of two and quickly move on to hexidecimal
and more advanced concepts like bit shifting. Although we’re
sure most of our readers are far past the ‘learning programming
from a blank slate’ portion of their hacker and maker career,
anything that gets more people solving their own problems is
okay in our book. [Ubi] has a