[Edu-sig] Re: The right learning environment

[Kirby Urner]

>
>this so much.  Given Scheme is as capable in principle
>of doing CGI type stuff and Python or Perl, it'd make
                          ^^^
meant:                   ala

i.e. in a similar vein, same way as, in an equivalent mode

As per your non-linear approach, Arthur, I think your
tendency to jump ahead (to "chapter 6") and preview is
good, and worth building in to a curriculum.  Students
want to see where this is all leading, i.e. what will
I be able to do after I finish this course of study?

To this end, I like tackling a language at more than one
level, i.e. just building up from primitives, and expecting
to build an HTML parser from scratch, takes too long and
is too daunting for a beginner.  Better is to do *some*
building up from primitives, but mixed with accessing
already-written advanced library features, and just
learning the API.  This is characteristic of real world
programming; you don't reinvent the wheel every time you
need one.

Taking advantage of library features gives you access to
some of the powerful stuff you want to do, while building
up from scratch gives you a sense of how these library
utilities are written -- and as you advance in your studies,
you'll become more able to read what's in the library
(if it's in a language you know -- Python modules might
be written in something else).

Like one of the student programmers mentioned in that Python
video made by students at Yorktown High (where Jeff Elkner
teaches -- one of the talking heads), the kind of questions
he gets from Python beginners are often about CGI kinds of
things, whereas in C++ classes, the questions never got to
this level, as students never progressed that far.

Kirby