From: Kenneth Johnsen <sanderum@...>
Date: 2006-06-12T03:37:29+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers?

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Hi Nick,

I recently landed a job teaching math and IT at a school here. I have just
finished my first 6 months, where we have mostly been focusing on HTML and
relational databases.

However, there's still programming and OO left in the curriculum (as well as
ERP and other things).

I initially had the idea that I would teach PHP, because it ties in nicely
with what my students know about html and the web, and I could do the OO
part with PHP, too.

But I think that Ruby would be better as a teaching language.

I'd be very interested in seeing what you come up with, if you decide to
teach Ruby. Maybe we can bounce some ideas off of eachother.

Regards,

Kenneth.


2006/6/11, Nicholas Evans <OwlManAtt@owlmanatt.com>:
>
> 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
>
>


-- 
Med venlig hilsen / Best regards

Kenneth Johnsen

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