I am in a similar situation to the author: I am an experienced programmer, and I am tutoring my wife, who left her job so she could devote all her time to learning to code. She's gone through all of the HTML, CSS, and JS CodeAcademy courses, and is now doing the Python course on Udacity.
While she hasn't needed a lot of help with those, she has also been working on extracurricular projects that I've helped put together for her. This is where I think the article was most revealing: I have been worried about helping too much, but now I can see why the opposite is true.
The author mentions that struggling with what you're learning is important. I agree. However, I think I have been letting my student struggle with the wrong things in the name of not "doing it all for her". I think it would be better to err on the side of providing every resource I can to define a straight path to a completed project. When she gets comfortable at a certain level, we can make the projects more complicated by involving more parts, rather than more frustrating by giving her less information.
I'm really enjoying the Coursera course on learning to program https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython. They have an interactive python implementation in javascript, so all the exercises are via browser - no configuration required at all. And the exercises are to build games.
Although I'm not building my own projects in the exercises, I am building something that I understand. This week's exercise was Pong and I'm looking forward to Asteroids in week 8.
Making something concrete really helps me understan the concepts.
Thanks for the tip! Would you mind posting a screenshot of Pong? I know that I loved being able to use graphics when I started, which is why I stuck to QBASIC as long as I did. Do they give you a library to use for drawing primitives (circles/squares/cthulhu), or is it all image-based?
While she hasn't needed a lot of help with those, she has also been working on extracurricular projects that I've helped put together for her. This is where I think the article was most revealing: I have been worried about helping too much, but now I can see why the opposite is true.
The author mentions that struggling with what you're learning is important. I agree. However, I think I have been letting my student struggle with the wrong things in the name of not "doing it all for her". I think it would be better to err on the side of providing every resource I can to define a straight path to a completed project. When she gets comfortable at a certain level, we can make the projects more complicated by involving more parts, rather than more frustrating by giving her less information.