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

[Dominique Devriese]

Hi,

I'm also curious about this. Is a pure programming style like
Haskell's less or more natural than an imperative mutable-state based
one to kids without experience. I intuitively expect that for kids
with a high-school background in mathematics would find the first more
natural, but this is not based on any teaching experience. Does anyone
have real-life experience with this or know of any related literature?

Thanks
Dominique

2011/1/27 Vo Minh Thu <noteed at gmail.com>:
> Hi,
>
> You said "Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else
> takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance[...]"
>
> I guess it is true for imperative programmers... but are you saying
> that about kids that just know how to use a calculator?
>
> Cheers,
> Thu
>
> 2011/1/27 aditya siram <aditya.siram at gmail.com>:
>> 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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>>
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