[plt-scheme] Scheme contradictions
I was a hischool teacher too and in my experience there is a strange thing:
I was teaching Visual Basic but I try to implement scheme
(or logo - logo is a great language, one of the best in my opinion) philosophy
(functional / declarative programming ). As s programming style it was great -
in 1/2 hour I was able to make "small"game - a plane could fire rockets to
another plane (the great was the simplicity and speed of coding).
You say it should be interesting for students, but there were 2 groups
first: students very intelligent - they started to make changes in the program
and make it better. but these students did not need games to be interested in
programming - they was eager to learn without any fun or games.
and the second group: little bit lazy and indifferent - as they see the game
they said - oh the teacher was made a game . he he but the "Counter Strike" is
better... and that was all . So games and fun is not enough to make students
interested unfortunately. The valuable reason to teach scheme I thing is not
the language itself , but the results of learning this concrete style of
programming - declarative programming as it is more close to way human think.
There was observation that students that learned scheme have increased their
results in the other subjects too - I think this is the reason to teach
scheme.
My experience showed the same , but only in students that was interested in
programming. I thing it was made by thems attitude to education
and scheme programming style (as far as this style is possible to implement
in VBasic) only helped them , but even this is enough.
Even more: I had one student with slight mental desеаsе but very interested in
programming - he eventually got slightly better - perhaps it was done thanks to
scheme style ?
best regards
> When it comes to learning the language it is very difficult outside of a
> classroom environment. There are SICP and HtDP but taken outside of a
> classroom setting they take a great deal of determination to get through.
> Compare this to Logo, you start out drawing little pictures and writing
> small conversations you can have with the computer. Fun and interesting.
> Netlogo, make a landscape with a hundred little turtles that will run up the
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