[Haskell-cafe] Haskell for children? Any experience?

[aditya siram]

Ye gods! A B & D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting
chance [2] at becoming future developers.

Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else
takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very
rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any
indication.

BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on
crow with gusto.

-deech

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage
[2] http://scratch.mit.edu/

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Chris Smith <cdsmith at gmail.com> wrote:
> So I find myself being asked to plan Haskell programming classes for one
> hour, once a week, from September through May this coming school year.
> The students will be ages 11 to 13.  I'm wondering if anyone has
> experience in anything similar that they might share with me.  I'm
> trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something
> different.
>
> To be honest, as much as I love Haskell, I tried to push the idea of
> learning a different language; perhaps Python.  So far, the kids will
> have none of it!  This year, I've been teaching a once-a-week
> exploratory mathematics sort of thing, and we've made heavy use of
> GHCi... and they now insist on learning Haskell.
>
> (By the way, GHCi is truly amazing for exploratory mathematics.  We
> really ought to promote the idea of Haskell for elementary / junior-high
> level math teachers!  It's so easy to just try stuff; and there are so
> many patterns you can just discover and then say "Huh, why do you think
> that happens?  Can you write it down precisely? ...")
>
> --
> Chris Smith
>
>
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