How do you help people learn logic? [closed]

Question

People who are not IT, more specifically programmers, do not have a good way of solving problems. They simply do not think like us, programmers, who have a good logic. I have been asked too many times what I would recommend them to improve their logic which would eventually help with day-to-day professional problems. Things that come up to my mind are good puzzles, math problems and etc.

Having said that, what would you recommend and why? Books, sites, articles ?

Answer 1

Related article on codinghorror.com:

Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats

All teachers of programming find that their results display a 'double hump'. It is as if there are two populations: those who can [program], and those who cannot [program], each with its own independent bell curve. Almost all research into programming teaching and learning have concentrated on teaching: change the language, change the application area, use an IDE and work on motivation. None of it works, and the double hump persists.

Quick takeaway from the above excerpt: The speculation is that whatever you do won't work if a person can't program to begin with.

To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it.

My proposed tongue-in-cheek solution: Convert them to atheism/nihilism. That way, they won't try to look for meaning where it is not [sic] and perhaps then come to terms with binary.