mjd sends in this link of a Perl introduction for middle school students, and notes that the author requests feedback.
Ken's focus was on high school students last year. His point, IIRC, is that the introductory books on Perl may be suitable for professionals with a background in using computers, but there are many other audiences who are interested in learning Perl. These include middle school students, high school students and so on. And then there are different levels of those students: those learning the fundementals of programming, and gifted students doing college-level work. (The need for textbooks at the university level still remains...)
Re:Why dumb it down?
r124c41 on 2001-11-18T16:01:42
I think that I have not dumbed it down but done what you suggest in my "Pearls of Perl" document at:
http://home.mindspring.com/user/djrassoc01/PoP/Pop.htm l
See also the companion computer club newsletters and an earlier text book like attempt at:
http://home.mindspring.com/user/djrassoc01/PoP/index.h tml
Success depends crucially on how you structure the thing. For example, I have found if you hit them with the "adventure code" first, many will glaze over and you will lose them to other pursuits. The ones who find it all trivial you will also loose if you are trying to keep everyone in lock-step in a teacher lecture style of doing things.
If you give them things that they can have immediate success on, then they will stay with it. Also, they are all given the document ("Pearls of Perl") and then are encouraged to go at their own pace--only have to stop after each lesson briefly to prove to the advisor that they really know what they are reading. That way the kids that think its so obvious (e.g., just like Basic was the comment given to me the other day) can blow through the stuff as fast as they can handle it not being blocked by waiting for a teaching to go through a line of code that they already understand.
