"Thus, teaching the non-interested -- or perhaps piquing the interest of the non-initiated -- can indeed be a formidable task."

Indeed. I've given up on trying to get my little sister (in 11th grade) interested enough to try programming, even though she did run Linux (exclusively!) for a couple years.

I always thought a decent idea to get someone started on programming from the ground up would be a simple, text-oriented RPG. This, of course, will work best if the person actually likes RPGs. This would be a simple introduction to basic ideas of control flow, data structures, and the like, but should be fairly fun. I'd be willing to bet that you can actually write a decent game, with good combat mechanics and plotline, without having to worry about complicated user interface/graphics issues.

Another similar idea would be to start "programming" through some sort of scripting/creation utilities available in other computer games. MUDs come to mind as the obvious text-based choice, but games like Neverwinter Nights and Warcraft come with nice graphical level editors that have some scripting capabilities built in.

In reply to Re: Re: Cases for teaching Perl by Falkkin
in thread Cases for teaching Perl by l3nz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.