From: david@... Date: 2006-06-14T04:24:28+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby for Highschoolers? Heh, yes I am very aware of the math-phobia in my students. The only time I can really get buy-in on math concepts is in a "necessary evil" capacity such as for game related scenarios. I'm certainly not going to have them solve fibonacci just for the sake of doing it, and there is naught a square root to be seen in the course work :) I'm shooting for more usage of RRobots next quarter after I can eliminate most of the "just ignore all that stuff, I'll explain it later" which I detest doing. David Koontz Quoting Christian Neukirchen : > 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 > >