[Haskell-cafe] Teaching High-School one-semester FP (using Haskell)

Zachi Baharav zachi at baharav.org
Thu Dec 10 21:55:06 UTC 2020


Dear mighty Haskell list,

I am a high-school teacher in the US (California, Palo Alto). We have an
advanced CS course that students can take after completing the AP-CS-A (in
Java). This is usually Juniors and Seniors, after at least 2 or 3 courses
of coding (Python+Java). Traditionally, I've done a potpourri of subjects,
mostly search algorithms as applied to 'games'. Of course a little bit of
data-structure comes in, and each year we did some 'other' interesting
subject (like halftoning, barcodes, and so on) and investigated and
implemented algorithms there.

THIS year, for the second half, I would like us to do
Functional-Programming. From what I have seen, my students over the years
tend to write more and more convoluted codes, electing first to search on
stackOverFlow for some similar pattern, rather than think and find a
concise and clean solution. I think FP would supply them with a new way of
thinking, which will help with whatever they will write later on.

I've been coding with Haskell for about 7 years, so feel ok leading the
class.

The question: I have many books on Haskell (i think 'all', but who knows.
Haskell, Real world Haskell, Learn you a haskell for great good,
programming in haskell, and many more).
--->  I am looking for something more hands-on and 'fun' for HS students.
may i say the buzzword 'project based', or maybe better 'problem based' for
our case.
Something that I could teach a little, and then we can solve a bunch of
problems, and teach a little more, and so on.

It doesn't have to be a Book!!  Just an outline of a course someone did
with associated bunch of problems would be awesome. We have 18 weeks in a
semester. My thought right now (if I don't find anything) is to relyon
Euler project early problems. These are often clean and simple in Haskell.
Or otherwise some CSES problems (which we've done in Java).

Ok, long enough email.

If you have material and can share here, great!
If you have material and want to reach out privately, please do (
zbaharav at kehillah.org).
If you have a good pointer, that would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance for any help!
   Zachi
(Dr. Zachi Baharav, HS teacher  (after 20 years in Industry and academia))
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