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!
I think what you’re doing is fine. I guess the problem with searching for solutions is that they’re either not used to doing that, or they want quick answers. Try to discuss with them about it, and tell them explicitly that you’re guiding them to be independent. Show them how you personally would look for problems with an example. Like “How to declare an array in Java”, etc. My professor used to pick an individual student’s problem and discuss it collectively and show others how to solve it, and I personally enjoyed it, too.
This is what I wanted to say. Googling is a skill. I work professionally as a programmer, and have for decades. A good chunk of my job even now is searching docs or the internet for the answers to my troubles. If a CS student can’t do that, they’re going to have a bad time.