On Sun, 2005-10-23 at 01:23 +0200, guy keren wrote: > On Sat, 22 Oct 2005, Nir Soffer wrote: > > > On 23 Oct, 2005, at 0:03, guy keren wrote: > > > <> קראתי קריאה מהירה את החומר שפרסמת פעם שעברה, לא מצאתי תשובות לשאלות <> בסיסיות כמו אלו (אבל אוליזה אשמתי): < > indeed - this is because i set up the material itself. what you ask are > meta-questions. i'll add answers to them on the web page later, but here > they are, basically: >
<> * במה הקורס שונה מתוכנית הלימודים של משרד החינוך? < > this course focuses about methodologies and good practices, and a lot of > actual programming, about extra self-studying, and personal pace. i skip > all the technicalities of C, and go directly to the fun stuff. thus, we > learn only what's needed to write specific games. if the kids will want to > learn more later in order to write more things - i'll encourage them to do > so. > The plan & reference adhere to this "only what's needed" philosophy. But the book seems to deviate. Will they use packed arrays? Linked lists? Undirected trees? Balanced trees? I'm afraid that the book transmits a bit of "professor stuff, I don't see how it can help me" feeling. I'll write detailed comments on it later. <> * למה בחרת דווקא בנושאים האלו לקורס הזה? < > because i wanted the course to be fun, and kids love games - so writing > games is the theme of the course. it is much better then writing programs > for the sake of learning a programming language and for the sake of > learning programming abstractions with no meaninig and no motivation, > that's the general rule in programming courses. > But writing effecient code is not fun -- not until you have been exposed to computer internals for a lot of time ;-). If I were beginning kid, an astract notion of "memory/CPU complexity" would completely fail to impress me. I think that all talk of performance must be delayed until they actually run something too heavy -- than you can teach them "this is how you make it fast" and they will *feel* the improvement. <> אם התשובות לא נמצאות באתר, כדאי להכניס אותן לשם. < > i will, after i phrase them better. > http://users.actcom.co.il/~choo/python/what.html This answers most questions but I still have one: Where does the book come in? It's obviously unsuitable for reading right from the beginning. It skips the question what are sequences / mappings / trees *good for*, assumes basic Python knowledge and plunges into advanced data structures. So what is your plan -- at what point do you want students to start reading it and how should it relate to the lessons outlined in the plan? The book is not explicitly organised in parallel to the plan. Nowhere does it say "study trees after lesson 7". Should it? I think that if I'm confused, students might get confused as well.
