On Mon, 24 Jun 2002, 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.
And ones which relate to real-world tasks, wherever possible. Students are right to ask, "When are we ever going to need _this_?" It's pretty-near impossible to satisfy all of those criteria with one exercise, but they're a good target to aim for. > 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 ? Well, you could use the ones in the Llama book. :-) Sounds like you want something released under one of the open-source licenses, though. What license would you use? I'm not up on the technical details of the various licenses, but we'd want to ensure that it wouldn't "infect" the rest of your course materials. (I don't think there's a large danger of that, but IANAL. Before contributing any exercises, it would be good to be sure of what license we'll be using.) The exercises in the Llama are tied pretty closely to their chapters. If we were to make an open-source set of exercises, would you want to follow the same chapter structure? If your course materials use a different structure, an exercise might require looping before you had taught that, say. (Of course, if it's open source, it would simply be a jumping-off point.) The first few exercises depend very strongly on what few features have been taught so far. Those first ones would be tough to make useful to everybody. Or, conversely, they'd impose a structure on your course, for good or not. > 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. Maybe there's a problem with the exercises, rather than the material. :-) After you get the basics of Perl, there are a number of directions you can go in. For most but not all of those, you'll need many but not all of these: references, advanced RE features, OOP, typeglobs, using modules, making modules, CGI, Tk, databases, regression tests, .... I'm not objecting to the idea of a standard like that, but I don't want to see someone say "Course X is more complete than course Y because X covers all of the 'official intermediate' features", not mentioning that course X is a one-day lecture that barely skims the surface, while Y is a week-long course with lab which gives you everything important about (say) databases in Perl. > 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. Well, that's just a special case of the open-source problem. :-) I don't think that all of these problems are impossible to solve, but they should keep you busy for a while. :-) --Tom Phoenix
