Scheme in a community college environment
Jonathan Bartlett
local community college. For the intro course only, each faculty person
gets to choose their own textbook. Obviously, I am considering HTDP.
HOWEVER, there are some issues, and I was wondering how you all would
address them.
1) The class is required to teach flowcharting (I have no idea why). Is
there a way to do flowcharting in a functional setting? How would that
jive w/ HTDP?
2) The class needs to teach structured programming techniques (i.e.
stateful functions with loops and standard variables). Is there a way
to mesh that w/ HTDP?
3) The class is taught over 3 weekends. Has anyone else taught HTDP on
such a tight schedule to new programmers?
Anyway, the constraints might be too much to include HTDP, but I thought
I'd see if anyone here had some innovative ideas.
Jon
----
Learn to program using Linux assembly language
http://www.cafeshops.com/bartlettpublish.8640017
Jens Axel Søgaard
> I may be teaching an intro to programming course as an adjunct at the
> local community college. For the intro course only, each faculty person
> gets to choose their own textbook. Obviously, I am considering HTDP.
>
> HOWEVER, there are some issues, and I was wondering how you all would
> address them.
Consider asking these question at the plt-edu mailing list.
--
Jens Axel Søgaard
Brian Harvey
>1) The class is required to teach flowcharting (I have no idea why). Is
>there a way to do flowcharting in a functional setting? How would that
>jive w/ HTDP?
Use dataflow diagrams -- that's more or less flowcharting.
>2) The class needs to teach structured programming techniques (i.e.
>stateful functions with loops and standard variables). Is there a way
>to mesh that w/ HTDP?
<advt> Look at the last section of _Simply Scheme_
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/simply-toc.html
where we build a spreadsheet and a database program using sequential,
stateful techniques.</advt>
>3) The class is taught over 3 weekends. Has anyone else taught HTDP on
>such a tight schedule to new programmers?
Jeez, it's hard to imagine teaching any language, with any text, in
that little time! I've done it with high school kids in a summer
program in which we had six weeks, three mornings a week, and that
felt rushed.
Jonathan Bartlett
> Jeez, it's hard to imagine teaching any language, with any text, in
> that little time! I've done it with high school kids in a summer
> program in which we had six weeks, three mornings a week, and that
> felt rushed.
Well, we get 3 hours friday evening, all day saturday, and then several
hours on sunday, so it's almost the same number of class hours as a
regular school year. I've heard some reports that people learn better
in this environment because the students can get in the learning zone
and stay there.
Anyway, I loved simply scheme -- checked it out from a library at U of I
when I lived there. I thought it was out-of-print. Thanks for pointing
it out, I'll have to look at it again!
Jonathan Bartlett
> Consider asking these question at the plt-edu mailing list.
>
How do you subscribe to this list? I can't find any information on it
anywhere?
Roberto Waltman
>How do you subscribe to this list? I can't find any information on it
>anywhere?
See:
http://www.plt-scheme.org/
http://www.drscheme.org/
http://www.plt-scheme.org/maillist/
Roberto Waltman.
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Roberto Waltman
Sorry, I replied too quickly. What I posted is the regular
plt-scheme mailing list.
"plt-edu" was based at brown.edu, but my links do not work anymore.
Does it still exist?