Re: talking to machines: Teaching beginners to program with an interactive ClojureScript REPL

[Pascal Chatterjee]

Oops, double post, can someone delete this?

On Saturday, 14 July 2012 18:03:16 UTC+2, Pascal Chatterjee wrote:

Hey everyone,

I've made a website that embeds an interactive ClojureScript REPL that I'd like to try and use to teach beginners the basics of programming. 

Try out the first chapter and let me know what you think! 

The site is a work-in-progress, but I think there's enough functionality to illustrate most of my ideas. The whole thing is fully open source, and I've tried to make it relatively easy to add or edit the chapters themselves, so if you have any suggestions for improvements I'm more than happy to hear them, in text or code form :)

// Pascal.

[Joshua Ballanco]

A couple of quick suggestions (hopefully they can be some help):

* It's too easy to click next on each page. I liked the first page better where I had to fill in a blank to get a result

* Using Math to introduce grouping of expressions might be confusing later when the student learns that Lisp math "doesn't work like that" (i.e. RPN instead of infix)

* Maybe it's just how my brain works, but I think it might be clearer to introduce "fn" in isolation first, then link it with "def", then introduce "defn"

Overall, I love the design! This is definitely a good start.

Cheers,

Josh

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Joshua Ballanco

ELC Technologies™

1771 NW Pettygrove Street, Suite 140

Portland, OR, 97209

jballanco@elctech.com

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http://www.elctech.com

On Saturday, July 14, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Pascal Chatterjee wrote:

Hey everyone,

I've made a website that embeds an interactive ClojureScript REPL that I'd like to try and use to teach beginners the basics of programming. 

Try out the first chapter and let me know what you think! 

The site is a work-in-progress, but I think there's enough functionality to illustrate most of my ideas. The whole thing is fully open source, and I've tried to make it relatively easy to add or edit the chapters themselves, so if you have any suggestions for improvements I'm more than happy to hear them, in text or code form :)

// Pascal.

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