Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl?

Your teacher friend certainly has his work cut out for him. As others have written, producing the course skeleton is pretty essential. Over and above that, I would recommend that he defines milestones for the students to reach certain levels of understanding.

Also, owing to the nature of Perl, I think there should be a significant component of hands-on, either 'lab classes' or homework. Getting to grok regexes for the first time does involve working a keyboard. Warning: we may get PM flooded with homework questions from this guy's students!

Another question is how affluent or otherwise the class, and the school are. Do the students generally have a PC at home with Internet access? Does the school have a computer lab classroom with one PC each per student, or do they have to share?

It may be worthwhile spending part of the first lesson explaining how to download and install ActiveState Perl from the Internet. Or, the school may have some Unix servers on which the students can log in and try their perl.

Good luck to this guy, and to you Ovid in your endeavour.

Comment on Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl?

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Re: Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl? by theorbtwo (Prior) on Aug 18, 2002 at 03:48 UTC
Sigh. Every time I write this node, for some reason, I forget to hit "sumbit" after previewing. Hopefuly I'll stop being idiotic and plauged by poor server response times. There are two important parts to teaching programming, esp. at a HS level. They are breaking down the problem into smaller pieces, and finding the solutions to those smaller pieces using the resources available (experementation, existing knowlage, reference materials, and other people). Actualy adding to their knowlage is a fairly minor piece of the puzzle. Fornatly, these are things that can be taught by a nonprogrammer; they are the same skills that any sort of problem-solving requires, which is why they are such important skills to teach. The reason that your post, riceWind, made me think of this view is quite simple: perlmonks is a very important place to find reference and other people to help solve those refactored problems. Students should be shown perlmonks... not only will this help them with the process of learning perl, and learning to program, it will keep them from going here to ask "here's my homework problem, how do I do it", unless they are total idiots. Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl?
by theorbtwo (Prior) on Aug 18, 2002 at 03:48 UTC

Sigh. Every time I write this node, for some reason, I forget to hit "sumbit" after previewing. Hopefuly I'll stop being idiotic and plauged by poor server response times.

There are two important parts to teaching programming, esp. at a HS level. They are breaking down the problem into smaller pieces, and finding the solutions to those smaller pieces using the resources available (experementation, existing knowlage, reference materials, and other people). Actualy adding to their knowlage is a fairly minor piece of the puzzle. Fornatly, these are things that can be taught by a nonprogrammer; they are the same skills that any sort of problem-solving requires, which is why they are such important skills to teach.

The reason that your post, riceWind, made me think of this view is quite simple: perlmonks is a very important place to find reference and other people to help solve those refactored problems. Students should be shown perlmonks... not only will this help them with the process of learning perl, and learning to program, it will keep them from going here to ask "here's my homework problem, how do I do it", unless they are total idiots.

Confession: It does an Immortal Body good.

[reply]