I moved to a 3rd world country a year ago to look for ways to motivate people to learn to code.
I thought it would be easier in a place where the benefits and needs are the greatest.
It is much harder than I thought... I used to think the people just needed the funds to go to school,
a patient personal tutor and/or extremely simple lessons (think computer game).
One person (~12 years old, on school vacation) simply would not learn code.
I mean, the person would not consider it for any reason.
I noticed that the person can play flappy bird with a high score of 71.
I justed wanted to see if a very well done game environment might motivate them.
Out of curious, I asked the person to play the Ouya game, Clark, that involves solving puzzles.
The person gave up after hitting a puzzle in which you have to position two blocks to prevent
the robot from being killed by 2 lasers.
In another case, I was able to convince the person (~27 year-old, college graduate) to take the javascript class at code academy but it didn't sink in.
This person works at a restaurant where they make $10/day working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week.
I've explained to them that as software developer they can make in a year roughly what they would currently make in 30 years.
I agreed to pay them to take a leave from work to learn javascript.
After getting about a third of the way through the course, they still made mistakes that they should have learned in the first 5 lessons.
(They couldn't remember where to put {}, (), commas, semicolons, function arguments, variable names, etc.)
After 3 weeks, I decide to try a different approach. I showed them simple functions like max(number1,number2) or indexOf(array, value), etc.
They could look at the solution as long as they liked. I explained it to them. The functions were only a few lines long.
Then I hid the function and asked them to write it from scratch using a syntax aware IDE. If they got stuck they could look at the answer and
I would explain where they were going wrong. It still took several attempts for them to write the function even when shown the answer.
After that first day of the new approach, I thought I found a way get them to remember the syntax but the next day
the person quit and returned to work at the restaurant.
I worked with several other people and the results are consistent.
Coding is a kind of puzzle solving problem that people dislike intensely.
Out the 10 or so people, I tried to help only one has gotten very far. She is 51 year-old mother of 3, and I was surprised by that.
I was actually trying to convince her kids (27, 18 and 14) to learn.
It is an interesting problem. I think there is a path to get people over their resistance but it is not obvious to me so far.