This e-mail - summarizes some of the responses/suggestions to using R for 13 year olds from my query on this list - discusses some additional investigation I did - the approach I am currently using (which will likely incorporate your suggestions for R)
SUGGESTIONS - find relationship between monthly heating bills and temperature. For data see http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/res40.pl?page=climvisgsod.html - generate fractal images, get chaotic behavior from a simple iterated function, or simply plot 3-d surfaces of sines and cosines - rep('Dad is a task master', 5000) and paste(c('Joe','Sally','Roger'),'is not playing with a full deck.') - analyze Bush vs. Gore vote. See http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron/policy.html . - rate autos (or other product) via several criteria and use stat methods to combine these into a single desirability score - spam filtering See http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html and http://www.mozilla.org/mailnews/spam.html . LANGUAGES Suggestions. I don't really want to get too sidetracked into the relative merits of various languages here as the intention was to focus on science, math and stats rather than programming, per se, however, for completeness some people mentioned the following two languages: - python (www.python.org). www.pygame.org allows you to quickly develop games in python and I noticed www.pythoncard.org which in the spirit of Apple's HyperCard (which is a commercial product at hypercard.apple.com that could also be considered) - the kid-friendly lisp variant, logo (el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation, education.mit.edu/starlogo) First Languages. Also my googling revealed that first year university courses in programming often use: - the squeak version of smalltalk (www.squeak.org), - scheme (www.drscheme.org is one possibility of many) and - java (java.sun.com , www.bluej.org). RAD. On the theory that rapid application development (RAD) provides better motivation, the commercial www.realbasic.com could be considered. Other. Finally, I am not sure where this one fits but I also came across www.toontalk.com which is a concurrent constraint language aimed at kids. CURRENT APPROACH My current approach is to start with HTML and then transition to Javascript followed by R: HTML --> Javascript --> R I think motivation is key since the exercise is pointless if the student lacks interest. HTML is pretty motivating since it does not take long to teach a basic tag set and after that you can develop your own web pages which is empowering. Moving to Javascriptis quite motivating since it allows one to put nifty dynamic features into your web pages. By that time you are using programming and its a natural transition from Javascript to R since the syntaxes of both are inspired by C. For teaching HTML, which is where I am now, I printed out the tag reference at werbach.com and both source and web page image of the pages at www.epcomm.com/webwiz . I am still deciding on how to proceed with Javascript and the answers here will undoubtedly help me formulate my approach to R. Variety. This approach means that we will have covered topics in: - web design via HTML - programming via Javascript, and - scientific/math/stats via R This should give him a broad introduction to three different areas from which I can assess his relative interest and return to refocus on that area of greatest appeal to him. Thanks to those who responded. ______________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list http://www.stat.math.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help
