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.

In reply to Re: Can a non-programmer teach Perl? by rinceWind
in thread Can a non-programmer teach Perl? by Ovid

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