From: Steven Davidovitz <steviedizzle@...>
Date: 2006-06-12T02:31:14+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers?

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 01:55:39 +0900
Nicholas Evans <OwlManAtt@OwlManAtt.com> wrote:

> Howdy list,
> 
> I'm a highschool student with a very high chance of ending up 
> student-teaching the Programming I course during the 07-08 schoolyear.
> 
> This year was the first year for the course, and Scheme was used. 
> However, I've been talking to the teacher about Ruby, suggesting that 
> she should try it for one of the programming courses next year. 
> (Unfortunately, there's no ready-made curriculum for Ruby available to 
> her, and she is not really a techie, so that idea was shot down.)
> 
> If I end up teaching it, I think it would be cool to cover Ruby instead 
> of Scheme. I'd have to develop my own curriculum, but whatever.
> 
> The goal of the course is to teach programming concepts in half of a 
> school year. The things that were covered during this year's course were 
> writing functions to do a simple calculation, using variables, and using 
> cond/booleans. Many students struggled during the beginning of the year 
> with writing basic functions. Our teacher kind of blamed herself for 
> that, because this was her first year teaching programming, and she had 
> never been trained on Scheme.
> 
> I think that teaching students Ruby might be a bit less...arcane. It 
> looks friendlier, for one. It would also open the course up to more 
> concepts than Scheme offers, like automagic testing, manipulating files, 
> object orientation, etc. Teaching OO during this course would probably 
> also benefit the kids later on for Java during Programming II...
> 
> So, given all of that, I have two questions for ya, list. One, do you 
> think there's any merit from teaching pretty non-technical sophomores in 
> highschool Ruby over Scheme? And two - Is there a DrScheme-eqsue 
> environment available for Ruby (screencap: 
> http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/drscheme/tour/images/editor-repl.gif)?
> 
> The DrScheme-esque thing is a big deal. The computer labs are *all* 
> Windows labs, and nothing will change this. The program serves as a sort 
> of incredibly simple IDE. In the top pane, you can put in your code, and 
> the bottom pane displays results and lets you use an irb-for-scheme type 
> thinggy.
> 
> I appreciate any comments you can give me, list.
> 
> Regards,
> Nick Evans
> 
> 

I think non-technical High Schoolers would definitely benefit from learning Ruby before moving on to other statically-typed languages. I am a junior next year and we only have one Computer Science course that teaches Java. I have a couple friends who took it this year and some of the code they have written this year could have benefited from prior knowledge of any basic programming. I taught myself Ruby using the Pickaxe book among others and I would have to say it is just absolutely fun to program in Ruby.

The IDE could be a problem, but if anything, it could probably be coded in Ruby using one of the toolkits in a couple days/weeks (using Fox, Tk, etc.).

-Steven Davidovitz