"Alf P. Steinbach" <al...@start.no> wrote: > One reaction to <url: <url:http://preview.tinyurl.com/ProgrammingBookP3> has > been that turtle graphics may be off-putting to some > readers because it is associated with children's learning.
[I'll be honest and say that I merely glanced at the two pdf files.] Who is your target audience? The opening Getting Started paragraph would probably put off many beginners right from the get go! You're talking about a 'first language' but throwing 'syntax', 'windows', 'graphics', 'networking', 'file and database access' and 'standard libraries' at them. The success of 'XXXX for Dummies' is certainly not their accuracy, but rather that they make far fewer assumptions that people already know the subject being tought! That assumption seems almost ingrained in every 'beginner' programming book I've ever seen! > What do you think? Whilst everyone knows children tend to think visually more than abstractly, the same is precisely true of adults. However, the ultimate problem with Turtle is that it ends up teaching a 'mathematical' perspective and it's far from intuitive how you map that perspective to tackling more real world issues. It's simply substituting one difficult abstraction with another. My recollection is that many children struggled with Turtle graphics because they had very little concept of trigonometry. [Why would they? Many wouldn't learn for another 2-10 years.] Adults tend to have even less concept since they almost never use trig (or much else from school ;-) in the real world. They can see the patterns and understand there's a logic to it, but they struggle replicating it. Get an angle wrong and you end up with a mess where it's not clear whether it's your algorithm or the maths that's at fault. The visual aspect might pique interest, but may put just as many people off. In any case, it won't relieve the difficulty of having to teach what is fundamentally an abstraction that doesn't have very good parallels with how people approach problems in the real world. Humans simply don't think like mathematicians^W computers. :-) I've met a lot of mathematics and comp sci teachers who honestly believe that you can't teach these subjects without a mathematical perspective. That stands in contrast to the number of people I see using spreadsheets with a very high proficiency who would never dream of saying they were good at mathematics or programming. -- Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list