Timeline for Language for teaching basic programming
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 10, 2015 at 6:58 | comment | added | Dave Clarke | The Racket people have developed educational material for middle school children and have used it with success: bootstrapworld.org | |
| Jun 12, 2014 at 20:29 | comment | added | vonbrand | @Raphael, I know quite a few people who are competent imperative/OOP programmers (even among people who weren't trained as such), and a scant handful that know their way around functional programming. Yes, recursion is natural if you are steeped in math thinking. Otherwise, it is just an extremely weird way of doing the "repeat ... until done" that comes really naturally. Come on, induction wasn't really understood until around Fermat's time, people have been defining/applying algorithms for a few hundred thousand years before that. | |
| Jun 12, 2014 at 6:20 | comment | added | Raphael | @PatrickCollins: I seem to remember studies that students (of any age) learned function programming faster than imperative programming if their minds had not previously been aligned to/polluted by the, arguably, rather unintuitive sequential-imperative paradigm (i.e. they were absolute novices). I can definitely confirm that for university: we teach function programming first and those without any programming experience have less trouble than others. | |
| Jun 9, 2014 at 16:19 | comment | added | Patrick Collins | I disagree. Functional programming is much more difficult to wrap your head around than imperative, even for college students. I would not want to teach middle school children about recursive data structures (an absolute must for Racket and co). | |
| Jun 9, 2014 at 3:32 | history | answered | user340082710 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |