From: Christian Neukirchen Date: 2006-06-13T22:46:44+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers? david@koontzfamily.org writes: > With the caveat that I a have students that are > either 50% programming / 50% art students or 100% art students and are > taking a required course, my experience has been that the concepts are > where people are getting hung up, not the syntax/language constructs. Now you mention it, I'd like to add one more thing: Don't do too much math. The CS class I need to attend is led by a maths/physics teacher, and we use Pascal---a language that sucks at string/symbol processing. A lot of my pals get turned off by calulating factorials, printing square roots or doing fibonacci stuff. With the languages considered here---Scheme, Ruby or Smalltalk---you have the great possibility to do better. For example, write a small database-like system with a few hashes, or a vocabulary trainer, or whatever. Sure, some of these math things are "essential", but there is so much more computers can do that is not number-crunching. Your students will like it, especially if they are not maths-oriented anyway. -- Christian Neukirchen http://chneukirchen.org