Hi, I'm new here, but I am interested in Racket and HtDP2 and thought I'd contribute to the discussion.
I think it's important to recognize that a book is very powerful in that the author's message can be duplicated essentially for free but also very limited in that in-person, one-on-one communication can do much more to ensure that the speaker's message comes across clearly. Regarding the Exercises, I think by "Exercises", gfb meant the instructions in the prologue to run things in Racket. As for how best to communicate the author's main point in this section -- which I understand as something like "with programming, you can make a rocket fly!" -- that is tricky because it has a few prerequisites. I agree that it is much better than a simple "Hello world," but I think that "Hello world" is still used so often because it is simple. In that regard -- the very first simple step -- evaluating "(+ 1 1)" is equivalent to "Hello world." This strikes me as an unsolved problem in CS education: the "best" introduction to programming. Many CS instructors are content to use what they have now, and we could do with a lot more innovation in this area. I think the HtDP2 prologue is superior to many alternatives. But I also think that it could benefit from a lot of "end-user testing" from adults, since adults (16-18 years old or older) with some math knowledge are much of the target audience as I understand it. (Alternatively, could we benefit from Bootstrap instructors' experience? My guess is that they have a lot more "end-user testing" than HtDP2.) I have no conclusion on how to improve the prologue, but those are my thoughts. -- 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. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
