[OT] Teaching Haskell in High School

[Arjan van IJzendoorn]

Hello all,

Michael Sperber wrote:

> I really recommend looking at the TeachScheme! curriculum and the How
> to Design Programs curriculum.  Here are two URLs:

I believe that the environment students work in is very important and can
help them learn languages quicker. And so the TeachScheme programming
environment is something I'm jealous of and my compliments to the people who
made it. Here in Utrecht we will try to do the same for Haskell with Helium:
a cool programming environment and the best compiler messages ever (we still
have some tricks up our sleeve for the near future).

> http://www.teach-scheme.org/

I've looked at the PPT presentation and it looks like a fine commercial for
functional programming. It could easily be adapted to Haskell and the syntax
would be even closer to their mathematical definitions. But I don't want to
argue about syntax, because that will not get us anywhere. Let the people
who love Haskell try and make an environment (and by that I also include
books, presentations and what not) that will make functional programming
nice to learn, maybe even in high school.

We will do our bit here with Helium so that the Haskell textbooks can be
used with Helium. Yes, that does mean adding type classes, but not the whole
machinery. If we support Eq, Ord, Show and Num with a limited number of
instances, chapters 1 to 11 of Hudak's book can be used without
modification. And importantly, the type errors can still be clear! No
"Cannot find Num instance of Char" for the expression "1+'a'" but
"The character 'a' is not a number and + expects one" (or something along
that line).

Oh yes, we'll need SOEGraphics, too, but who knows...

If we think Haskell is good for high schools and for using in other courses
(like logic and so on), let's try and prove it!

Kind regards,
  Arjan van IJzendoorn

PS: What does [OT] stand for? Off topic? I don't think this is off topic.