> But novices can handle only so much. I agree that we don't want to > create artificial worlds, but we must take care on how much and what > we present on day 1. The surest way to lose students is to talk about > things they don't understand and see no need for. Kernels are not day > 1 material (for anyone). >
I show excerpts from the documentary 'Revolution OS' (not the whole thing), in which Linus himself does a good job of describing the job of an operating system. I don't do this on day one though, like you say. > The other issue, of course, is the variety of learning paradigms. Some > people are more visually oriented than others. When I taught Python to > adult testers last year we didn't need a visual approach (although we > used Komodo for easy development). But when my 14-year old nephew last > year said, "Uncle Chuck, teach me to program!", I had his attention > for 30 seconds and then he was gone because I had nothing graphical > (i.e., Alice-like) for him to play with. He just could not grasp > typing 2+3 at the command-line ad getting 5 out. Who cares about a > linear conversation with a computer console? > I tell my Saturday Academy kids that if they're serious about programming, they need to learn to be "brutally lexical" -- and then I go on to demonstrate what that means (which *doesn't* mean we never do graphical). Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
