<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 6/15/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Jeff Rush</b> <<a href="mailto:jeff@taupro.com">jeff@taupro.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>I've never seen programming books in the form of children's books -- can you<br>point me at some for -other- programming languages? I'm curious what they<br>would look like, and maybe we can get some for Python if we have examples and
<br>names of publishers who've already done it.</blockquote><div><br>"Good questions dude" -- imagining a certain facilitator in a <br>small conference room. He was all surfer Bay Area talk or <br>something, effective at the time.
<br><br>Here's the arc as I see it. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming,<br>terse and "telegraphic" as Tim Peters calls it, is the "in a nutshell" <br>reference, but then Stanford started using 'Concrete Mathematics'
<br>as build up (recommended by Tim in this archive, near the start).<br><br>Then comes Jason and me yakking up 'Who is Fourier?' by the <br>LEX Institute, a language learning think tank. Like 'Concrete' and
<br>like the wildly successful 'For Dummies' ('Complete Idiots' and so<br>on), there's a lot of doodling, marginalia, jokes. The jocularity <br>component is way up. Then comes O'Reilly with 'Head First into
<br>Java' and we're really seeing the culmination of a trend.<br><br>What I think has happened is CS has shed its skin as a wannabe<br>staid math, has proved its points, in terms of utility, sophistication,<br>future etc., and now can afford any pretense at trying to be
<br>pretentious. The readership is there, already impressed and ready<br>to learn. So the key thing is to use *psychology* (including <br>"sublymonal" like in those Sprite commercials).<br><br><a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sprite+ad+obey+sublymonal&btnG=Search">
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=sprite+ad+obey+sublymonal&btnG=Search</a><br><br>Where you see the "for kids" approach amped up is on satellite TV,<br>like on <a href="http://www.nick.com/">http://www.nick.com/
</a><br><br><a href="http://brandnoise.typepad.com/brand_noise/2006/09/cartoon_packagi.html">http://brandnoise.typepad.com/brand_noise/2006/09/cartoon_packagi.html</a><br><br>We're not there yet with the books, but I think the arc will continue,
<br>with aqua teens (and duckman) teaching Python, as it were.<br><br>Kirby<br><br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
> His kids are ready to learn, but with what? Where's the kid-friendly<br>> fantasy angle?<br>><br>> Given the popularity of Piratology and Dragonology books, you'd<br>> think O'Reilly'd already have something similar (actually that'd be
<br>> a departure -- it's kid book authors and illustrators with track<br>> records we need, mixing OLPC & CP4E (a "head first" for kids<br>> -- like not too dumbed down, even with all those twisted aqua
<br>> teen type graphics)).<br><br>Hmm, as you say O'Reilly isn't a primary source of children's books, but the<br>kid book authors and illustrators in turn are not sources of programming<br>books. How the heck are you going to get them to work together? They think
<br>differently and don't have established relations.</blockquote><div><br>Think how young the O'Reilly brand is, compared to Walt Disney say. <br>A new crop of geeks is only now starting to have kids. The open source
<br>revolution is all post boomer. Yes, you and I caught it too, but we'd<br>already gone through the PC revolution with IBM versus Apple. That <br>was an earlier time. The next wave will produce a new literature. Plus
<br>there's already a wave behind that and so on. Expect change.<br><br> </div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">> Listing 1: exercise: circle a dict object being initialized. What
<br>> alternative syntax might the writer have used? Give a short<br>> example in the space provided: ___________________________<br><br>An interesting idea for teaching - showing source and asking students to<br>reason -about- it, instead of writing programs from scratch for exercises.
<br>I'll have to consider applying this in some Python educational ideas I have.<br><br>-Jeff<br><br></blockquote></div><br><br>Yes. I talk about recall versus recog (even to them) and how we learn <br>language from immersion in adults speaking fully formed sentences,
<br>learn new language likewise, from being around expert speakers.<br>This is recog. Doing it from scratch, as a source, an author, is <br>recall. In between is a whole spectrum of part recog, part recall.<br><br>I use heavy recog in early exposure, as I'm more into having them
<br>decipher mature code examples, the very ones used in our class, <br>complete with vector and rhombic dodecahedron classes talking out<br>to VPython, POV-Ray and more recently X3D. I have them learn <br>about common structures, such as initializing objects, populating
<br>data structures, then have 'em eyeball source a lot, applying their<br>recog skills. Then will come tweaking, messing about with little <br>changes -- to colors for example. To numbers of things, parameters.<br>
<br>"Blank canvas" programming is really only a small percentage of <br>what employed programmers do. A lot of it involves tweaking inherited<br>work. Someone new to programming is already immersed in an <br>environment where source code is already ubiquitous. The first
<br>question isn't "is it there, running in the background" but "is it <br>open or closed" (i.e. "can I see it, will I recognize when I do?").<br><br>Kirby<br><br>