At 10:00 PM 6/24/02 +0100, Stephen Collyer wrote: >One of the problems I had when writing a Perl >training course was that of coming up with a >decent set of exercises, particularly ones that >are not too trivial or too difficult, and also >ones that are not too boring. > >In view of this, I was wondering if anyone would >be interested in contributing to an openly >available set of exercises that any Perl trainer >could have access to ? > >The idea would be to provide a set of graded >exercises that are suitable for beginning/ >intermediate/advanced/whatever Perl programmers, >maybe with solutions, maybe not, that anyone >involved in Perl training could use. > >I see the following advantages: > >1. the quality of Perl training generally may >improve, if trainers do not have to spend a >large amount of time thinking up exercises. > >2. It would set a standard against which a >student could evaluate a course; if an intermediate >course fails to cover material deemed to be >itermediate by the exercise set, then maybe >there's a problem.
It is advantageous in the sense that exercises are the most difficult part of the course to come up with IMHO. This ought to improve their quality. >OTOH, I see a big disadvantage: maybe noone would >want to contribute their exercise ideas, as it >would allow people to leech off their hard work >in thinking them up; in short, maybe exercises >represent too much investment in IPR to share. >My POV is that the most important IPR in a training >course resides in the quality of the course material, >and the contents of the presenter's head, but >maybe others will disagree. Presenter's head first, but I'd probably rate the exercises and course materials neck and neck. The biggest disadvantage I see is in the prerequisites. Particularly in the more elementary classes, an exercise solution is likely to include something that hasn't been taught by that stage of a particular presenter's class. It's not really practical to give an exercise and say, "By the way, for this exercise you'll need to know the substr(), index(), and reverse() functions, none of which I considered important enough to have taught by this stage." And you won't get consensus from trainers about whether they should have taught the "while (<>)" construct by the time they get to hashes, for example. With enough examples to choose from this is less of a problem. >(and of course, there are other potential >problems: who can contribute ? who decides the >level of difficulty of a problem ? who hosts >the set of problems ? etc) > >Anyone want to blow this idea out of the >water ? > >Steve Collyer > >--------------------------------------------- >Stephen Collyer >Netspinner Ltd 01722 336125 -- Peter Scott Pacific Systems Design Technologies http://www.perldebugged.com/
