I am teaching J to non-native English speakers (Japanese university
students)
as part of an optional Technical English course for engineering students.
The main objective of the course is to gain experience at listening to and
presenting in English. The topic could be anything, but I use J because it
allows you to do computations with little fuss and in
a radically different way than a procedural approach.
Response to the J part of the course has been mixed, keeping in mind the
wide range of abilities in both English and programming. On the positive
side,
students get an insight-like (aha!) feeling of discovery when they can see
the meaning behind the symbols. However, getting to this point requires
breaking some long-held assumptions over what the symbols mean
(e.g., confusing the use of "-" versus "_"; or "_1" versus "_ 1"). It may
seem obvious to an experienced J person and hence hardly worth more
than a passing remark, but these are the sorts of things that can really
block progress when attention is drawn to a more complex expression. For
example, students can get stuck on even the simplest expressions like
*: _ 1
_ 1
which looks like a bug - square of negative 1 is negative 1. In trying
to work out what went wrong, a student may tend to focus of the part
that is not immediately obvious (*:) and fail to question the more
basic assumption that _ 1 means negative one. Casual experimentation
can even reinforce the false assumption that space is not significant:
-1
_1
- 1
_1
_1
_1
_ 1
_ 1
Steve
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Steven Phillips, PhD
Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences Group,
Neuroscience Research Institute, AIST
1-1-1 Umezono, Tsukuba Central 2, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8568 Japan
Tel: +81 29 861 5165 (PHS: 45165) Fax: +81 29 861 5857
WWW: <http://staff.aist.go.jp/steven.phillips>
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Steven H. Rogers wrote:
I'm doing an informal survey on the use of Array Programming Languages
for teaching. If you're using J in this manner I'd like to hear from
you. What subject was/is taught, academic level, results, lessons
learned, etc.
Regards,
Steve
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For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
