[racket] review my tutorial?

Matthias, thank you so much for your response.  Coming to Racket has been
exactly what I needed to take an interest in programming and education and
find a path that works!  I will definitely follow through with learning the
2htdp/universe teachpack (which was on my list anyways), and hopefully I
can help make a bridge between Minecraft and Racket so there's a simple and
familiar 3d building environment to work with.

I am actually interested in trying to introduce programming ideas to
children as young as 5 or 6.  Much of the mathematics taught to children at
this age in the Montessori school I work at is embedded into physical
materials.  I'm trying (with my purely amateur understanding) to come up
with activities that can start teaching the fundamental thinking skills
that HtDP seems to be aiming at.  Minecraft seemed like a good replacement
for actual real-world building blocks.  I was hoping some examination of
building structures via recursion, and building more complex things out of
simpler programs would be helpful to teach children who don't already have
a familiarity with algebra.

Daniel, my first experience with programming as a child was LOGO and turtle
graphics.  Perhaps that is why I still have an affinity for the Lisp
family.  I was actually hoping to implement some kind of turtle builder
into the Minecraft Pi world.  However, it seems like the Turtle graphics
style of programming is very different than the HtDP/Bootstrap way.  Are
there thoughts about that?  For young children, those kind of robotic
instructions seem to make more sense, I am at a loss to find ways to make
recursion and functional programming more concrete.

Thanks again for being responsive to my questions.  Without any formal
training in either programming or education, I can use any help I can get
to pursue my ideas.

-grant
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/attachments/20130802/542424da/attachment.html>