Chris Stephenson writes: > Parantheses and learners - experience with 14-18 year olds > > I have just finished giving a two week intensive course to 14-18 year olds > at the Mathematics Village near Ephesus in Turkey
Very interesting email all around! > (a) A change of syntax between the two halves had proved confusing for > students You actually touched on something that has been at the back of my mind for a while. Else where in this discussion: Matthew Flatt writes: > At Sat, 20 Jul 2019 18:07:40 -0400, Christopher Lemmer Webber wrote: >> - Are people happy? Is this meeting their needs? Get community input. >> At this point, if the community is happy enough, and if it appears >> that *newcomers* (including in the educational space) are happy >> enough, now we can focus on switching the core Racket system over >> to ~Honu-as-the-basis. > > I agree that the process would have to be something like that. > > I'm skeptical of starting with teaching languages in the sense of BSL, > ISL, and ASL. That sets up some different problems --- ones that Pyret > has directly addressed/explored. (Obviously, we should pay attention to > Pyret.) I've been thinking about this, and I think that it's hard enough *for me* to jump between different syntaxes. If there was a switch to ~Honu as being the default, it really should be ~Honu everywhere... not ~Honu in one place and Pyret like syntax in the other (or vice versa). That kind of context switch is really hard. In my experience, the most empowering thing for students is "being able to write programs that do cool things". If we use different syntaxes, I think this will feel like the worlds between a "beginner's language" and the "main world of Racket" will feel like too much of a jump... I know *I* get intimidated by a shift in syntax, and I'm sure that for students, it's even harder. Gerald Sussman explained Python's success, and the reason for the switch from Scheme and SICP to a Python based curriculum, as being because Python had for whatever reason libraries that allowed students to be able to lego together examples very quickly. I've made the case that Racket is the Python of lisps... even if we aren't continuing to have a lispy syntax by default, we should realize that this is a strength we don't want to lose. If there's a syntax gulf between the restricted student languages and the "main" language, we'll diminish that value we're providing to newcomers. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/87zhk2wfc5.fsf%40dustycloud.org.
