Some background: due to the whole "autistic recluse hermit" thing I've got going on since very young, I've always been the sort to search for info in books or the internet instead of other irl humans. So I don't even have personal experience to draw from on how that changed for myself.

I'm currently mentoring some young (adult) programmers and preparing some coursework for them, and I've always been confused by how much difficulty beginners have with "just" searching for solutions to their problems online. (I put "just" in quotes there because I realise that it's actually difficult for them.)

This leads to a lot of situations where they'll ask me things and I'll literally just send them one of the top 5 duckduckgo results that I find on a quick search, which is usually exactly what they need. Besides creating learning bottleneck (i.e. if I am otherwise busy they could be left waiting too long), I worry that they won't develop the independence to find the solutions themselves in the future.

But I definitely don't want to tell them to "Just Google DDG it" or RTFM. Not because I don't think they actually should, just because I think they might take that as some sort of insult or think that I'm not interested in helping (when in fact I'm always more than happy to help even with trivial stuff like this).

I recognise that one part of the problem is that they're not all comfortable with their English, and native language search results are usually not very good. But I reckon there's more to it that I'm just failing to understand, and if I don't even properly understand the problem, I won't be able to come up with a proper solution. I don't think this is a local issue, so I believe others here might have encountered this in the wild too and understand it better than me.

What am I missing here?

Edit: Great comments all around, I'll ponder all the suggestions and insights here and see what I can do. Thanks comrades!

  • Maoo [none/use name]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Three things to focus on:

    1. They might not know how to Google for research purposes. You can teach them how to do this and check stack overflow given a question. You'll want to do this as an intentional lesson not as replies to messages.
    2. Knowing what to search for requires a baseline of knowledge they may not have and don't have the time to pick up through self-teaching during the period of your course. You probably self-taught many things, but was it all while also working 30 hours per week and taking courses?
    3. What are the things they'd need to search for? Why aren't they part of your course materials? Algorithms, databases, installing/configuring software, etc should really be provided by the teacher. Many CS courses are terribly taught because they assume every student is already very good with unix-ie administration, installing libraries, setting up an IDE, and so on. Despite this, those same programs offer no resources for learning those things and don't even advertise that they're required to succeed. These are probably things you should front-load for the first two weeks or so.