[plt-scheme] Question on Teaching Scheme with DrScheme

From: Lear, Russell (Russell.Lear at usa.xerox.com)
Date: Thu Oct 31 10:30:30 EST 2002

Not sure if this is a reasonable request, but here goes...

My 12 year old daughter was looking over my shoulder while I was working on
something in DrScheme.  She asked questions so we went over the arithmatic
operations and did some simple function definitions (computing the area of a
circle and using that to compute the volume of a cylinder).  She bought into
the lisp notation surprisingly quickly.

Anyway, she's pretty excited over this and wants to learn more.  Are there
any resources people know of on teaching kids simple programming?  "Scheme
and the Art of Computer Programming" wasn't written with 12 year old kids in
mind!

Is Scheme a poor choice for this project?  The interactive nature of
DrScheme is a big draw and I'd hate to try to explain Java to her, but I can
be flexible.

I suspect this interest will eventually fade, but I'd like her to get
something out of it while it lasts.

Thanks for any thoughts,
Russell.



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