[plt-scheme] Do no evil

On Mar 8, 2010, at 8:23 AM, wooks . wrote:
> > Pictures for teaching a bad algorithm and fancy animations that  
> cost a
> > good amount of money to produce make things WORSE not better. Think
> > about it. No design recipe needed.
> >
>
> Well it engaged my students and got them interested in seeing how  
> it's implemented.
>
> It also provides me with a vehicle for introducing do and arrays  
> both of which they need  to learn.

Seems to me it would make more sense to motivate arrays with the  
purpose they really serve, O(1) access to a large collection of data,  
as with graphs or union-find, or more mundanely perhaps, game boards  
and other stuff where Schemers would tend to prefer lists.

I say this just because using bubblesort to motivate do & arrays seems  
kind of like the hardcore Schemers (not of the PLT school of thought)  
using factorial & exp-time fibonacci to motivate recursion...i.e.,  
losing some students, understandably, at "why would I care about  
that?" and others at "wait--so people use this stuff for algorithms  
that are so bad nobody uses them?"

jmj