Read, Write, Talk, Sing, Play: What Early Literacy Can Teach Us About Software Literacy

The Takeaways

So What?

So What?

So what?

So how does work in early literacy help inform software and programming literacy? It offers a framework on how people learn and what motivates them to do so. Companies continue to try and find the magic formula that not only produces good work, but also keeps the employees happy enough and compensated enough to not go work for someone else. Superficial understanding of each of these concepts often results in gimmicks, where the attempt is halfhearted and the people it's supposed to motivate end up giving it shade, snark, or sass. Or it produces a massive list of "required" things or a culture that insists on having to know so much before someone begins that are a major turn-off to getting new people (and non-coders) on board or interested in the project, whether as a contributor or a user. These come from rigid applications of a framework that is inherently flexible and personalizable. Each learner comes to literacy their own way, and methods have to be able to work with that.