[Haskell-cafe] Call for interest: Haskell in middle school math education

[Chris Smith]

Hello fellow Haskellers!

Are you interested in getting Haskell into middle school (ages 11-14) math
or other classes?  I'd love to hear from you!

Many of you are probably already aware that I've spent the last several
years teaching Haskell to children and teens via my CodeWorld project (
http://code.world and http://github.com/google/codeworld).  Well, 2017 is
my year to make a bigger success of the whole effort.  So, let's get
Haskell into K-12 schools as a part of mathematics education.  By
incorporating a programming language like Haskell that's faithful to
modeling using true functions, variables, and equations, we can make
mathematical modeling and algebraic reasoning tangible and creative in a
way it's never been before.

There's a lot that's already been done, but the task is still daunting.
With some help from some coworkers of mine at Google, and in conjunction
with the New York Haskell User Group, I've put together a small budget of
around $60K in USD, to start this ball rolling a bit faster with some paid
help.  Some possible goals include:

- Produce quality instructional materials to help teachers around the world
incorporate Haskell into their classes and after-school activities.
- Produce videos and online resources to support students learning on their
own.
- Build software features make the CodeWorld tools more helpful, easier to
use, easier for students share their work more broadly, and more supportive
when students need help.
- Make what we already have available to more students, and educate more
teachers.
- Spread the word and look for more support so we can keep up the effort
after the initial investment is finished.

Everything produced as part of the project will be distributed under either
the Apache 2.0 open source license, or the latest Creative Commons
attribution-only license, so that it's freely available for any educational
institution (or anyone else) to use, modify, redistribute, etc.

So here's where you can step in:

- Join the codeworld-discuss@ mailing list (https://groups.google.com/
forum/#!forum/codeworld-discuss)
- Introduce yourself, and tell us a bit about what vision you have, and
what role you might want to play.  This could be a spectator, teacher at a
school near you, volunteer contributions on the side, or even a leadership
role with a salary attached!

Cognizant that solo decisions can be poor ones, I hope to follow some
initial sharing of ideas with gathering a small handful of like-minded
individuals - I know you're out there - to make decisions about the best
way to manage the effort, and go from there.

Some background reading:

- Blog post on the defining decisions of my effort so far
<https://cdsmith.wordpress.com/2016/05/22/codeworlds-big-decisions/>
- The web site and its source code <https://github.com/google/codeworld>
- A huge bag of partially incomplete stuff already produced
<https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/0B-qIu_nqxaMoYTQ4ODZjMjMtNWRiOC00OWZiLWI3MzMtOGIxODIyZDkxODBk>
- A similarly motivated project using Racket
<http://www.bootstrapworld.org/> that gets a lot right

I look forward to hearing from you.
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