Ye gods! A B & D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers.
Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication. BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on crow with gusto. -deech [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage [2] http://scratch.mit.edu/ On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Chris Smith <cdsm...@gmail.com> wrote: > So I find myself being asked to plan Haskell programming classes for one > hour, once a week, from September through May this coming school year. > The students will be ages 11 to 13. I'm wondering if anyone has > experience in anything similar that they might share with me. I'm > trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something > different. > > To be honest, as much as I love Haskell, I tried to push the idea of > learning a different language; perhaps Python. So far, the kids will > have none of it! This year, I've been teaching a once-a-week > exploratory mathematics sort of thing, and we've made heavy use of > GHCi... and they now insist on learning Haskell. > > (By the way, GHCi is truly amazing for exploratory mathematics. We > really ought to promote the idea of Haskell for elementary / junior-high > level math teachers! It's so easy to just try stuff; and there are so > many patterns you can just discover and then say "Huh, why do you think > that happens? Can you write it down precisely? ...") > > -- > Chris Smith > > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe