On 14/06/2006, at 8:09 PM, David House wrote:

Hi all,

Next year I will have the opportunity to teach Haskell at my school! I am very excited about this and hope to offer something beyond the VB6 and Pascal that is currently available with the school's Computing course. A high school, or a university? I'm planning to create some Haskell resources for high school teaching as a project next semester, but I haven't got much more than some vague plans at the moment.

The time slots will be very tight -- one 25 minute session a week. However I will have a year's worth of weeks to teach it in, so I hope to cover most of the major topics with Haskell, including monads (which I appreciate some of the more pedestrian courses tend to skip :)).

My question is whether anyone has any advice as to:

1) How to structure the course as a whole? 2) How to structure the lessons (theory/practical balance)? 3) How ambitious should I be? 4) Which pratical projects work well? At the moment I'm thinking that a brief introduction to functional programming (functions and recursion, maps and folds, and ADTs) will be a good start, followed by some project work. The idea is to give them just enough of a foundation to get to grips with some simple code, then jump into something that they can engage with. I think that Haskore and Pan will make ideal vehicles for secondary education, but I am still looking for a wider range (not every kid like music or graphics). If I can find a way to make it work (at a level suitable for high school), I'm planning on using a simple matrix maths library for 3D graphics to explain monads.

I've written a few paragraphs about my plans at <http://haskell.org/ hawiki/User:Thsutton/Teaching>. Comments, contributions and edits are welcome (and will be referenced when I write it up). Cheers, Thomas Sutton