
So I find myself being asked to plan Haskell programming classes for one hour, once a week, from September through May this coming school year. The students will be ages 11 to 13. I'm wondering if anyone has experience in anything similar that they might share with me. I'm trying to decide if this is feasible, or it I should try to do something different. To be honest, as much as I love Haskell, I tried to push the idea of learning a different language; perhaps Python. So far, the kids will have none of it! This year, I've been teaching a once-a-week exploratory mathematics sort of thing, and we've made heavy use of GHCi... and they now insist on learning Haskell. (By the way, GHCi is truly amazing for exploratory mathematics. We really ought to promote the idea of Haskell for elementary / junior-high level math teachers! It's so easy to just try stuff; and there are so many patterns you can just discover and then say "Huh, why do you think that happens? Can you write it down precisely? ...") -- Chris Smith