[racket] off-topic -- Re: Live coding with Racket?

On May 29, 2014, at 6:00 PM, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 29, 2014 at 08:59:44PM +0000, George Rudolph wrote:
>> 
>> I am thinking about having students in my upcoming Programming Languages
>> course do one or more live coding exercises, perhaps
>> even a live performance at the end of Fall semester.
>> There are other live coding tools,
>> but I plan on teaching them functional programming using Racket, so why
>> not have some fun?  I'd be interested in any suggestions you all might have as to how to make that experience pleasant for all.
> 
> Maybe there should be a htdp book that uses live coding and audio 
> instead of numbers or pictures?


I intensely dislike 'fun' in education. It's like medicine; if it is bitter, it will heal you :-)




A lot of effort in US K12 education is about "getting students interested" and "making it fun and engaging." What saddens me to no end, is that this movement is swapping over into College. In my experience this desire to make classroom experiences "fun" is partly due to a lack of teacher training -- teachers don't know enough about the material to bring across their excitement and enthusiasm, intrinsic to the material rather than with extrinsic tricks and tools -- and only partly due to an unwillingness on the students' side to engage. 

Having said that I think it is important to connect educational material to the real world and even making this connection "fun" -- as long as the introduction of this material does not overwhelm the key mission of classroom instruction, the teaching of principles that inform a person's life long ability to learn. I think I succeeded in creating a decent compromise with HtDP/2e and the mixing in off reactive programming and some decent batch programming. Going even further in the direction of "application" and "fun" would smother the design principles. 

I think that this philosophy applies equally well to POPL courses; after all, it all started for me in those courses. 


-- Matthias