| Matthew Rosewarne on 20 Mar 2007 22:32:30 -0000 |
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On Tuesday 20 March 2007 18:16, bergman@merctech.com wrote: > There's no information about what grade levels are involved here...and I'd > give very different recommendations for beginning programming in 7th grade > vrs. 10th grade vrs as a first-year college student. Oops, I should have mentioned that the target audience is high-school students, although perhaps an afterthought could be given to bright middle-school students. > My opinion is that learning programming is about learning paradigms, > structured ways of problem solving, and a new way of thinking, much more > than learning the syntax of specific languages. Exactly, so the ideal language is the one that clearly gets these ideas across while hopefully enforcing correct practise. Pascal is quite good at those things, but has the other drawbacks I mentioned. One approach might be to use Pascal for teaching basics and something else to teach further concepts, in particular OOP? > I think that the best language for teaching beginners is one that the > teacher knows well and can express. It doesn't sound to me from the > original post that Matthew will be teaching himself. Perhaps he could help > the students best by supporting the existing teacher[s]--even mentoring > them in learning a new language. That's correct, I won't be the teacher. One of the reasons Pascal is taught is because that's what the teacher knows. I've worked with him before though and he'd probably be willing to try something else if I can provide support. Attachment:
pgp2VkDOL8OsE.pgp ___________________________________________________________________________ Philadelphia Linux Users Group -- http://www.phillylinux.org Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce General Discussion -- http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
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