From: Brian Guthrie <bguthrie@...>
Date: 2006-06-12T13:51:10+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers?

Nicholas Evans wrote:

> 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...

Hi Nicholas,

For what it's worth, I took an introductory CS course taught by one of 
the authors of How to Design Programs as a freshman, and we used that 
book as the class text.  I found both the curriculum and the instructor 
to be immensely annoying, and I won't go into it, but suffice it to say 
that I think there's a lot to recommend other approaches, including the 
reasons you gave.

That having been said, developing a curriculum for any subject is 
difficult.  Computer science is a harder subject than most, and a lot of 
very smart people have used up a great deal of ink trying.  Moreover, 
Scheme is a powerful language that's well worth knowing, even if it 
takes several years before you realize what you've learned.  If you do 
start to develop your own set of lesson plans, please post them online 
as you write them.  I'm sure you can find people, myself among them, who 
would be happy to read them and make (completely uninformed) suggestions.

 > 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 think you're right about DrScheme, and unfortunately, I can't think of 
any Ruby-based IDEs with similar features.  I can't imagine that it 
would be hard to replicate the salient features of DrScheme, minus the 
debugging, pretty easily in Eclipse, although I don't know that anyone's 
tried yet.

For those wondering how an IDE could possibly be useful for a beginning 
programming course, you should absolutely download DrScheme and check it 
out.  You might be surprised.

I guess at the end of the day I do think that Ruby is a pretty good fit 
for beginners, even non-technical sophomores.  I *can* say that HtDP 
left a pretty sour taste in my mouth for a long time.  But Ruby is 
relatively internally consistent, it's elegant, it's friendly, and it's 
immediately useful.

Brian Guthrie