[plt-scheme] Re: HTDP - evidently not for everyone.

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 8:27 PM, Matthias Felleisen
<matthias at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> Stephen's emphasis on 'problems that are similar' seems
> close to a mix-and-match of the old experiment-with-examples
> approach with an HtDP-style framework around it
>
>

Ah, I see what you mean now, and I think he safely stays away from
that. The problems that are most similar to the examples are more of a
check that the student got the point of the example and understands
how it works. Think of it as "Teacher: Why is there a 10 in this
function body? Student: Because the circles have radius 10. Teacher:
If we wanted circles of radius 20, what would we do? ...."

The key, of course, is that the way he works through the example
problem is completely focused on the Design Recipe and very carefully
lays out for the student how to approach the problem. The questions
afterward tend to follow the pattern of, "Now that we've worked
through this, what would we modify to get a different result? How
would we approach a problem that's conceptually similar, but
different?" I think Stephen is doing a very good job of providing the
kind of questions that a good teacher provides if a student has
trouble making the conceptual leaps that HtDP demands. Since he's
aiming at students who have more trouble making conceptual leaps, I
think it works pretty well.

Todd