Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Message: 7 Date: Sun, 20 Feb 2011 04:34:56 +0900 From: Benjamin L. Russell dekudekup...@yahoo.com Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience? To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Message-ID: ijp613$9q5$1...@dough.gmane.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Actually, I've been wishing for a high-level way of creating an interactive three-dimensional virtual world in Haskell that doesn't require explicit knowledge of linear algebra. Ideally, I'm looking for a Haskell way of creating a functional counterpart to, say, Open Cobalt (see http://www.opencobalt.org/) that is high-level-enough not to require explicit manipulation of row and column vectors. One of the main problems, however, is the lack of reflection. Ideally, I would like the project to be able to modify its own framework in real time, so that, for example, within the virtual world, users would be able to create portals to other virtual worlds, and then write code while the project was running to change the configuration without restarting the project. Then users would be able to write code in the functional style to change the virtual environment _in situ._ It's not Haskell, but this sounds a lot like Newspeak: http://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html John L. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Jason wrote: I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to be able to write things to disk so badly (I have no idea why), but to me that was what 'real' programming was all about. Actually, that reminds me of one of my motivations for programming when I first started programming (in N80-BASIC on an NEC PC-8001 mkII in Tokyo) in circa 1983. Back then, I first became enamored of the concept of programming upon seeing an Apple II-plus running a music program at a computer show (in Tokyo) in 1981 (just outside, and on the 38th floor of, the Sumitomo Sankaku Building in Shinjuku). There were a number of computers on display at that event, including Commodore 64s and other Apple II-series models, but the one that stood out the most was an Apple II-plus hooked up to an organ keyboard and a color monitor (many of the other computers were attached to monochrome displays). When I played music on the keyboard, vertical color bars appeared on the display, and the idea that an inanimate object could respond in real time to human actions with color and sound somehow felt extremely gratifying. Two years later, in 1983, when I borrowed an NEC PC-8001 mkII (from a computer store in Ginza) (the no longer existent Micom Base Ginza) and wrote a pocket book accounting program in N80-BASIC, I insisted on saving my data to disk. For some reason, the idea of being able to leave an external trace of my program's efforts on a physical medium, where the results would remain even after the computer was turned off, somehow made me feel as if the program had bestowed upon me, the user, the ability to make a difference, however minor, to the outside world as a direct result of programming the computer. For some reason, from my child's eye then (I was 15 years old at the time), this made me feel important. I agree that sound, animations, etc... are very sexy and if done right can increase their enthusiasm many fold, but it also has the ability to turn them off from the simple elegance of what first hooked their interest. So start simple and be attentive to what THEY enjoy and you will give them the most valuable programming knowledge of all: passion. While I understand this approach, when I was first exposed to computer science in college, I thought that, too often, issues of input and output and storage and graphics and sound were ignored in introductory classes. Although such concepts may be trivial from a theoretical viewpoint, from the eye of a child (or even beginning computer science student), they are some of the aspects that can make programming exciting: the ability to cause the computer to reach to human input in real time with color graphics and sound, and to leave a trace of the interaction in the outside world for a future session even after the computer has been turned off. One of the reasons that I started reading, for example, Paul Hudak's _The Haskell School of Expression_ was the author's emphasis on multimedia. One of the reasons that I started programming with N80-BASIC in 1983 was the language's support for color graphics and (albeit elementary) sound. -- Benjamin L. Russell Best of luck and keep us up to date on your blog/reddit posts! -- Jason M. Knight ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Chris Smith wrote: Manuel, Wow, that gloss package is really cool, and exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. As I've said before, I don't think I can prevent this from becoming about how to write games eventually. Gloss looks like provides a nice way to approach graphics programming in a simple functional style, with a clean interface consisting entirely of high-level ideas, and which easily switches over to the game interface later. Awesome! Actually, I've been wishing for a high-level way of creating an interactive three-dimensional virtual world in Haskell that doesn't require explicit knowledge of linear algebra. Ideally, I'm looking for a Haskell way of creating a functional counterpart to, say, Open Cobalt (see http://www.opencobalt.org/) that is high-level-enough not to require explicit manipulation of row and column vectors. One of the main problems, however, is the lack of reflection. Ideally, I would like the project to be able to modify its own framework in real time, so that, for example, within the virtual world, users would be able to create portals to other virtual worlds, and then write code while the project was running to change the configuration without restarting the project. Then users would be able to write code in the functional style to change the virtual environment _in situ._ Eventually, the project could be used as the egg for a much larger project that would allow users to work, study, shop, pay bills, and trade, all within a virtual city. Users could program in Haskell in a virtual classroom, write code in real-time to reconfigure the behavior of the classroom, then work on-line (say, by doing translation work) to earn a living, then pay rent or online bills without leaving the virtual world, and, when bored, form parties or alliances with other avatars to complete quests, craft items, or battle mon^H^H^H bugs to earn experience points, blurring the borders between work/study and play. -- Benjamin L. Russell Thank you so much for pointing it out. -- Chris Smith ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Manuel, Wow, that gloss package is really cool, and exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. As I've said before, I don't think I can prevent this from becoming about how to write games eventually. Gloss looks like provides a nice way to approach graphics programming in a simple functional style, with a clean interface consisting entirely of high-level ideas, and which easily switches over to the game interface later. Awesome! Thank you so much for pointing it out. -- Chris Smith ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:28 AM, aditya siram aditya.si...@gmail.com wrote: Ye gods! A B D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers. Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication. BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on crow with gusto. IMO, the two very rare qualities part is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Didn't a lot of us spend endless hours tinkering with Linux configurations or seeing how many ways there were to use the debugger to make the computer crash when we were teenagers (if we were lucky enough to have computers as teenagers, anyway)? Kids -- and other people -- do amazing things when no one tells them it's hard. To the OP, I think teaching Haskell to 11-13 year olds should if anything be easier than teaching it to undergrads. At that age, they're less likely to have absorbed social math is hard messages and less likely to have absorbed Real-Programmer-ish ideas about what languages they're supposed to be programming in or what languages are practical. Sounds like a joy! Also, if you haven't, check out the book _Mindstorms_ by Seymour Papert -- the particular programming paradigm he advocates is different, but there should be some good fundamental ideas to inspire you. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier * http://cs.pdx.edu/~tjc/ * Often in error, never in doubt an intelligent person fights for lost causes,realizing that others are merely effects -- E.E. Cummings ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 1/27/11 10:26 , Stephen Tetley wrote: John Peterson had some nice work using Haskore and Fran for elementary teaching on the old Haskell.org website. Google's cache says the old URL was here but its now vanished: www.haskell.org/edsl/campy/campy-2003-music.ppt web.archive.org is your friend. - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk1E9WcACgkQIn7hlCsL25VcUACbBjYscWmlm5QaHGWooQyqb0o1 mUEAn0D5LXJK8Gt+B8/ShqQclbs8R2Gs =8EdW -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 1/27/11 10:28 , aditya siram wrote: Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication. Isn't there already a body of evidence that people who've never been exposed to procedural languages find functional programming to be much more natural? (I vaguely recall trying to teach someone at a summer camp what = did in BASIC; they were using the equational meaning, and assignment wasn't clicking with them at all.) - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk1E9hIACgkQIn7hlCsL25WStwCgnCXonPchAQtXjmC1YOz8fGql NL4AnRZQXY4oIXMZ3I0yK6jVTZt6DOOY =i8cJ -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 1/30/11 00:24 , Brandon S Allbery KF8NH wrote: Isn't there already a body of evidence that people who've never been exposed to procedural languages find functional programming to be much more natural? Also worth pointing out is that kids get math flash cards early, at least here in the US; while they're obviously trivial, they're still both equational and algebraic. So they're very probably already used to that meaning, and systems of equations and ADTs are actually fairly easy jumps. - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allb...@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allb...@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk1E92EACgkQIn7hlCsL25WsWwCcDyoxsulKYstH2bXdeUBu/RB0 3A4AoL59wMMxMsSt032bXQ0ceQ+TDJUB =amOK -END PGP SIGNATURE- ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On 28 January 2011 01:23, Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com wrote: [TRUNC] I did look at Haskore, and there's a lot to like about it; but also a lot to worry about. The documentation talks about it only being able to do synthesis on Linux (but that documentation seems to be old; I wonder if this is still true); it definitely suffers from wall of modules syndrome ... Hi Chris Note that Haskore-vintage and Henning's Haskore are now quite different. From the date I'd assume John Peterson's slides would have been using vintage Haskore (at the time it wouldn't have been called vintage, of course). Vintage Haskore generates MIDI files only, Paul Hudak has a large tutorial for vintage Haskore, its (probably) too long for kids but you could certainly crib a lot from it. Paul's also re-doing the School of Expression book to concentrate more on music - I think he's making drafts available. If you have Haskore specific queries, the Haskell-art list is better than Cafe as Paul is a regular commentator there. Best wishes Stephen ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
I think this is a wonderful idea! Fer land sakes, I remember when kids were taught BASIC or Fortran! I think Haskell will be a great improvement. Now, how'z'bout web sites? Kids love web sites, yes? I've been working on a small project, in quiet mode, to develop an all in the web browser development environment and tutorial on programming in Haskell with web programming as the main focus. So far the development environment part is up and running: you start like this: barley start playground ...project created Running on http://localhost:8080/ Now you browse to that URL and you have a Haskell development environment in the web page. Edit Haskell modules, and click save... bang! compiled with either in-line error messages, or if it runs, with a web page preview output. It's a lot of fun, actually. Here's the catch: The project isn't even at 0.1 yet: The above works, but there are some missing features from the development environment, and, most importantly, there is only the barest wisp of a tutorial yet. BUT - you aren't starting until next year, so help us write the tutorial! The project is, for now, here: https://github.com/mtnviewmark/barley But will be moving to code.google.com in a few weeks. - Mark Mark Lentczner http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/ m...@glyphic.com ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:26 PM, Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com wrote: Like I said in the original post, my initial reaction was to push for something like Python. But the kids are very clear; if I'm at all willing, they want to learn Haskell! IMO the most important facet of education is motivation, which it sounds like the kids already have in spades. Therefore, your primary job is to feed and protect their enthusiasm while making it easier for them to learn what they want (and guiding them in the right direction). It sounds like whatever you were doing with GHCi was working, so I would build off of that and expand it to programs that require writing to disk, interact with one another (networking), and such. I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to be able to write things to disk so badly (I have no idea why), but to me that was what 'real' programming was all about. I agree that sound, animations, etc... are very sexy and if done right can increase their enthusiasm many fold, but it also has the ability to turn them off from the simple elegance of what first hooked their interest. So start simple and be attentive to what THEY enjoy and you will give them the most valuable programming knowledge of all: passion. Best of luck and keep us up to date on your blog/reddit posts! -- Jason M. Knight ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Chris Smith schrieb: On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 11:44 -0600, aditya siram wrote: I was a little negative in my last message so maybe I can contribute something positive. If you're looking for a musical way to teach Haskell I did a Haskell music hackathon [1] about a year and a half ago. The idea was to use Haskell [2] to play music through a Supercollider music server [3] . Well, it seems like music is a good possibility for part of it. We're talking about a weekly class for a year, so it'll go beyond that. I'm sure that whatever I do, I won't be able to prevent it ending with the programming of video games! I did look at Haskore, and there's a lot to like about it; but also a lot to worry about. The documentation talks about it only being able to do synthesis on Linux (but that documentation seems to be old; I wonder if this is still true); it definitely suffers from wall of modules syndrome -- there's no obvious top-level module with a simplified interface that I can see... no starting point or anything beyond type signatures, a lot of abstraction, and the apparent existence of many different types all called named with a capital T. Maybe, though, I can wrap it in something more simple and usable. Sorry for not-up-to-date documentation. I think that looking at the various examples is most helpful for a start. I can't provide a link to code.haskell.org since it is down. But there is an Example directory. And maybe: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskore ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Jason, thanks for the comments. Unfortunately, I probably won't do blogs about it. Hate to say it, but anyone who has read much outside of /r/haskell will surely agree it's irresponsible to write about children on Reddit. And things I write on my blog are likely to end up on Reddit. I'll find somewhere to do an experience report, though, assuming this happens. ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com wrote: Jason, thanks for the comments. Unfortunately, I probably won't do blogs about it. Hate to say it, but anyone who has read much outside of /r/haskell will surely agree it's irresponsible to write about children on Reddit. And things I write on my blog are likely to end up on Reddit. I have not read much outside of /r/haskell. Why is this irresponsible? Luke ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
[Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
So I find myself being asked to plan Haskell programming classes for one hour, once a week, from September through May this coming school year. The students will be ages 11 to 13. I'm wondering if anyone has experience in anything similar that they might share with me. I'm trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something different. To be honest, as much as I love Haskell, I tried to push the idea of learning a different language; perhaps Python. So far, the kids will have none of it! This year, I've been teaching a once-a-week exploratory mathematics sort of thing, and we've made heavy use of GHCi... and they now insist on learning Haskell. (By the way, GHCi is truly amazing for exploratory mathematics. We really ought to promote the idea of Haskell for elementary / junior-high level math teachers! It's so easy to just try stuff; and there are so many patterns you can just discover and then say Huh, why do you think that happens? Can you write it down precisely? ...) -- Chris Smith ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Ye gods! A B D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers. Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication. BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on crow with gusto. -deech [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage [2] http://scratch.mit.edu/ On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com wrote: So I find myself being asked to plan Haskell programming classes for one hour, once a week, from September through May this coming school year. The students will be ages 11 to 13. I'm wondering if anyone has experience in anything similar that they might share with me. I'm trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something different. To be honest, as much as I love Haskell, I tried to push the idea of learning a different language; perhaps Python. So far, the kids will have none of it! This year, I've been teaching a once-a-week exploratory mathematics sort of thing, and we've made heavy use of GHCi... and they now insist on learning Haskell. (By the way, GHCi is truly amazing for exploratory mathematics. We really ought to promote the idea of Haskell for elementary / junior-high level math teachers! It's so easy to just try stuff; and there are so many patterns you can just discover and then say Huh, why do you think that happens? Can you write it down precisely? ...) -- Chris Smith ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Hi, I'm also curious about this. Is a pure programming style like Haskell's less or more natural than an imperative mutable-state based one to kids without experience. I intuitively expect that for kids with a high-school background in mathematics would find the first more natural, but this is not based on any teaching experience. Does anyone have real-life experience with this or know of any related literature? Thanks Dominique 2011/1/27 Vo Minh Thu not...@gmail.com: Hi, You said Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance[...] I guess it is true for imperative programmers... but are you saying that about kids that just know how to use a calculator? Cheers, Thu 2011/1/27 aditya siram aditya.si...@gmail.com: Ye gods! A B D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers. Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication. BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on crow with gusto. -deech [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage [2] http://scratch.mit.edu/ On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com wrote: So I find myself being asked to plan Haskell programming classes for one hour, once a week, from September through May this coming school year. The students will be ages 11 to 13. I'm wondering if anyone has experience in anything similar that they might share with me. I'm trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something different. To be honest, as much as I love Haskell, I tried to push the idea of learning a different language; perhaps Python. So far, the kids will have none of it! This year, I've been teaching a once-a-week exploratory mathematics sort of thing, and we've made heavy use of GHCi... and they now insist on learning Haskell. (By the way, GHCi is truly amazing for exploratory mathematics. We really ought to promote the idea of Haskell for elementary / junior-high level math teachers! It's so easy to just try stuff; and there are so many patterns you can just discover and then say Huh, why do you think that happens? Can you write it down precisely? ...) -- Chris Smith ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 15:26 +, Stephen Tetley wrote: John Peterson had some nice work using Haskore and Fran for elementary teaching on the old Haskell.org website. Google's cache says the old URL was here but its now vanished: www.haskell.org/edsl/campy/campy-2003-music.ppt That sounds great! If you do have an existing copy of the slides, I'd like to see them. Especially the idea of using music for programming with a nice embedded DSL / combinator library would be amazing. -- Chris ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:26:01 +0100, Stephen Tetley stephen.tet...@gmail.com wrote: On 27 January 2011 15:04, Chris Smith cdsm...@gmail.com wrote: [SNIP] I'm wondering if anyone has experience in anything similar that they might share with me. I'm trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something different. Hi Chris John Peterson had some nice work using Haskore and Fran for elementary teaching on the old Haskell.org website. Google's cache says the old URL was here but its now vanished: www.haskell.org/edsl/campy/campy-2003-music.ppt I've copies of the slides somewhere but the landing page had extra notes and examples. I can send you the slides off-list if you want them. The old server is still up till the end of this month (four days to go!); the URL of the landing page is: http://oldhaskell.cs.yale.edu/edsl/ Regards, Henk-Jan van Tuyl -- http://Van.Tuyl.eu/ http://members.chello.nl/hjgtuyl/tourdemonad.html -- ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
Ye gods! A B D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers. Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication. Begone, disbeliever! And listen to the gospel of Matthias Felleisen preaching the truth: http://vimeo.com/6631514 (presentation from ICFP 2009) The paper is A Functional I/O System - or, Fun for Freshman Kids: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/icfp09-fffk.pdf Alas, it's about Scheme, but I am sure it would be both interesting and useful regardless. Cheers, /Niklas ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 16:40 +0100, klondike wrote: Two days ago I was referred to this project: http://wizbang.sourceforge.net/WizBang/WizBang.html The language is quite imperative but to me looks as a child friendly programming language due to its low complexity. Thanks for this and other related suggestions. Really, though, I'm not looking to find a new language; and almost surely not one like WizBang. I do want to keep things light, interesting, and fun... a DSL inside of Haskell might be interesting. But the absolute last message I want to send is that I don't think they are ready for a real language. Not after they've already played with Haskell and GHCi for mathematics! -- Chris Smith ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
Re: [Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?
On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 09:28 -0600, aditya siram wrote: Ye gods! A B D [1] language for kids? I do share those concerns. Like I said in the original post, my initial reaction was to push for something like Python. But the kids are very clear; if I'm at all willing, they want to learn Haskell! And honestly, I'd like to try it too, *if* I can do my due diligence research, and pay attention to others who might have tried and learned some lessons along the way! At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers. [2] http://scratch.mit.edu/ Thanks for that suggestion; unfortunately, much like the WizBang suggestion, Scratch is going to come across as if, for some reason, after happily using GHCi for math, I now don't trust them with a real programming language. I can guarantee you they won't be interested in programming by dragging around brightly colored things that look like puzzle pieces on the screen; and I can't imagine keeping it up for the whole year even if they were interested. -- Chris ___ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
