[plt-scheme] Re: Poacher turned gamekeeper

On Nov 10, 1:53 am, Shriram Krishnamurthi <s... at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
> > They are a captive audience. They do not have the option of dropping
> > the course.
>
> Then don't be hostile.  You will already face a little resentment for
> doing things non-traditionally.  Show them instead why it's better.
> After showing them animations with World, show them that you have
> already introduced them to what is generally considered an "advanced
> software engineering" topic (MVC, for us) in week 1.
>

I was more reflecting the fact of the situation rather than my
attitude. My information is that I am really dealing with the
uninitiated - the college caters mainly to overseas students, in fact
the language that may cause the most problems is English rather than
Scheme.

I made no mention of scheme or functional programming in the selling
it to the college - just talked about focusing on a data analysis
based approached to problem solving and the fact that we exploit that
to get students up to speed quickly because their curriculum is
language agnostic. I explained that I couldn't start with Java without
having to explain alot of things on day 1 that are not really needed
for day 1.

If anything the fact that English may be a problem strengthens the
case - it is hard enough   explaining public static class to people
who are supposedly fluent in the language (to be honest I don't even
understand it myself). The suggestions to use the animation based
material also fit well given the linguistic challenges.

As I said, there will be a 2nd course in OOP and at the moment I am
scheduled to take that. The simple answer to objectors is that they'll
do Java next term (although I am tempted to do it in Python).