in reply to Perl High School

There were a couple of really good assignments that I had in high school. One was to write a program that generates poetry. Say in the most stern voice you can muster, "No dirty poetry!" and the students will instantly form a deep understanding of the project. The other hint is to mention to the students is that funny poetry uses funny words. Also, there is some advanced perl code available for your more ambitious students to study.

Another assignment is to implement the board game "Battleship." This challenge is less interesting because it stresses the book-keeping aspect of coding. If the students have enough time to create a real game-playing program, it is very interesting, but it is a difficult assignment.

I would like to see more posts about your experiences with teaching perl to high school students. It is something that I hope to try in a year or two. Please post again or msg me if you would like to share more ideas.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

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Re: Re: Perl High School
by hsweet (Pilgrim) on Feb 23, 2002 at 17:18 UTC

    Limericks? Shouldn't be too hard. I like the poetry idea a lot. I am trying to come at this from more of a language approach than from the math end. Check the course site occasionally. I'm quite liable to make it an assignment. Programming can be intimidating for beginners as can math so math + code = I quit.

    I thought of battleship already, (except for the how to do it parts). I'll post again eventually.

    I also plan to run some of the student's cgi scripts on my website. (Anybody interested in writing a page for the site or anything else, email me at hsweet@gcsny.org)

[reply]
      The only problem with using Perl to write poetry is that TheDamian has made it into a one-liner... :-) 
      perl -e 'use Coy; die "Just another Perl hacker,"'

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