Re: [racket-dev] Interactive Tutorial

[Stephen Bloch]

On Mar 21, 2012, at 3:34 PM, Nick Shelley wrote:

> My brother has been interested in learning to program, but not super 
> motivated. I've tried to get him into HtDP 2e, but for him there's too much 
> reading and not enough doing (and when he comes to the exercises he usually 
> skips them anyway...). However, he recently started doing some codecademy 
> exercises and really enjoys it.
> 
> It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to turn the "Quick" guide into 
> something similar by using something like WeScheme. I also know of several 
> people who have expressed interest in learning to program but definitely 
> don't have the motivation to go through HtDP. It seems like the codecademy 
> approach is ideal for those types of people (the people who would like to dip 
> their feet before diving in).

Depending on what motivates the person, _Picturing Programs_ might work.  It 
starts with graphics on page 1, and starts building event-driven GUI programs 
before you ever see an arithmetic operator.  See picturingprograms.org .

On the other hand, if your brother is the sort to want to absorb a lot of 
material quickly, Picturing Programs probably isn't ideal: it goes more slowly 
than HtDP.



Stephen Bloch
sbl...@adelphi.edu

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Re: [racket-dev] Interactive Tutorial

[Danny Yoo]

> It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to turn the "Quick" guide into
> something similar by using something like WeScheme. I also know of several
> people who have expressed interest in learning to program but definitely
> don't have the motivation to go through HtDP. It seems like the codecademy
> approach is ideal for those types of people (the people who would like to
> dip their feet before diving in).

This is going to be summer work for me.

I've started at the problem.  There's a undocumented "embedded" mode
in WeScheme that lets you drive it from the outside, so that you can
manage your own content.  It's nowhere near done yet; as soon as I get
this dissertation document done, I can get back to making it actually
usable.

For example:

http://hashcollision.org/tmp/wescheme-docs/test-control.html

If you look at the source for test-control, you'll see that it
currently has a very minimal RPC to WeScheme going on.  What needs to
be done is collecting what other operations we need to drive
interactive tutorials besides just evaluation.
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[racket-dev] Interactive Tutorial

[Nick Shelley]

My brother has been interested in learning to program, but not super
motivated. I've tried to get him into HtDP 2e, but for him there's too much
reading and not enough doing (and when he comes to the exercises he usually
skips them anyway...). However, he recently started doing some
codecademy exercises
and really enjoys it.

It seems like it wouldn't be too hard to turn the "Quick" guide into
something similar by using something like WeScheme. I also know of several
people who have expressed interest in learning to program but definitely
don't have the motivation to go through HtDP. It seems like the codecademy
approach is ideal for those types of people (the people who would like to
dip their feet before diving in).

I don't think I have the know-how to do something like that, but I'd be
willing to help if anyone thinks it's worth tackling at some point.

-Nick
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