Ian, i like your point about procedural programming having potential for learning mathematical concepts. for a while now, i've been meaning to work through "SICM":http://mitpress.mit.edu/SICM/, which uses Scheme to teach classical mechanics. i'm really curious to see how well that approach works.
i'm not at all tied to Mindstorms. i haven't even used them before. the idea for the first year is just to have something that has some real world connection (and his hopefully a bit easier than programming a STAMP chip and wiring your own circuits).
yeah, web stuff probably could be a little more prominent. i was just afraid that it would be too much too soon. but then, i remember learning the basics of HTML in about 15 minutes, so i guess it wouldn't be unreasonable to at least do a short unit on it early on.
For an approach that harnesses social forces in positive ways, check out this curriculum at the Canterbury school (pycon2003):
http://tech.canterburyschool.org/pycon/teaching_pygame.html
And an hs curriculum that incorporates Extreme Programming (pycon2005):
http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyConDC2005/Presentations#22
Drawing from my personal experience, the first cs class I took in college was lucky enough to be with Robert Sedgewick, who was working on a grant to develop the Halliday and Resnick of CS.
Here is a link to curriculum - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr98/cs126/
It was really great - a survey of all the major sub-fields in cs, with a weeklong unit on things like graphics, ai, animation. Not like a psych or sociology survey class, with multiple choice exams - very well designed and integrated lectures and problem sets.
One thing that worked incredibly well early on, was that Prof. Sedgwick had us write programs which generated postscript, allowing us to work on programs that had a graphical, "fun" output (although I shiver at how many trees were killed debugging, until we figured out how to use ghostscript).
Postscript is essentially logo, and was really easy to master.
I remember the second program I wrote in my entire life generated pictures of mandelbrot sets (the equation for generating them is _very_ simple) - that was incredible.
The next week we played with recursion, and everyone got to make up their own shape, in postscript, which was repeated in a fractal-like pattern.
For the "pointer" project, we had to solve the nearest neighbor problem for a starfield, using a technique where we divided the space into a grid of boxes and only considered a star's nearest neighboring boxes.
Perhaps I am just a visual thinker, but the power of this approach is evident in my vivid recollection of these programs.
dynamic, high level scripting lang + logo-like postscript = fun entry level programming
I am certain that many of these exercises could be adapted for hs.
anders - 2005-09-08 14:58:34
Ian, i like your point about procedural programming having potential for learning mathematical concepts. for a while now, i've been meaning to work through "SICM":http://mitpress.mit.edu/SICM/, which uses Scheme to teach classical mechanics. i'm really curious to see how well that approach works. i'm not at all tied to Mindstorms. i haven't even used them before. the idea for the first year is just to have something that has some real world connection (and his hopefully a bit easier than programming a STAMP chip and wiring your own circuits). yeah, web stuff probably could be a little more prominent. i was just afraid that it would be too much too soon. but then, i remember learning the basics of HTML in about 15 minutes, so i guess it wouldn't be unreasonable to at least do a short unit on it early on.jonah - Sun 11 Sep 2005 02:02:24
For an approach that harnesses social forces in positive ways, check out this curriculum at the Canterbury school (pycon2003): http://tech.canterburyschool.org/pycon/teaching_pygame.html And an hs curriculum that incorporates Extreme Programming (pycon2005): http://wiki.python.org/moin/PyConDC2005/Presentations#22 Drawing from my personal experience, the first cs class I took in college was lucky enough to be with Robert Sedgewick, who was working on a grant to develop the Halliday and Resnick of CS. Here is a link to curriculum - http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr98/cs126/ It was really great - a survey of all the major sub-fields in cs, with a weeklong unit on things like graphics, ai, animation. Not like a psych or sociology survey class, with multiple choice exams - very well designed and integrated lectures and problem sets. One thing that worked incredibly well early on, was that Prof. Sedgwick had us write programs which generated postscript, allowing us to work on programs that had a graphical, "fun" output (although I shiver at how many trees were killed debugging, until we figured out how to use ghostscript). Postscript is essentially logo, and was really easy to master. I remember the second program I wrote in my entire life generated pictures of mandelbrot sets (the equation for generating them is _very_ simple) - that was incredible. The next week we played with recursion, and everyone got to make up their own shape, in postscript, which was repeated in a fractal-like pattern. For the "pointer" project, we had to solve the nearest neighbor problem for a starfield, using a technique where we divided the space into a grid of boxes and only considered a star's nearest neighboring boxes. Perhaps I am just a visual thinker, but the power of this approach is evident in my vivid recollection of these programs. dynamic, high level scripting lang + logo-like postscript = fun entry level programming I am certain that many of these exercises could be adapted for hs.