Hi Chris, I was a little negative in my last message so maybe I can contribute something positive. If you're looking for a musical way to teach Haskell I did a Haskell music hackathon [1] about a year and a half ago. The idea was to use Haskell [2] to play music through a Supercollider music server [3] . Supercollider itself just generates sound so I had to code up support for scales, arpeggios and chords including the ability to generate arpeggios and chords from some user-defined scale. One of the fun applications of this support was to grab 2 yrs worth of DOW closing numbers from Yahoo Financial and set it to music. The user was able to select a scale, key, octave and instrument and the code would autogenerate notes within that scale and with a chordal accompaniment. It was right around the time of the American presidential election and the economy being such a big issue, it was fun listening to the music start off high but get lower and lower over time. You are welcome to play around with it and if you run into any difficulties, let me know. -deech [1] https://patch-tag.com/r/deech2k/SuperCollider-Haskell/snapshot/current/conte... [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/haskore-supercollider [3] http://supercollider.sourceforge.net// On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 11:06 AM, Chris Smith wrote:

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 15:26 +0000, Stephen Tetley wrote:

...

John Peterson had some nice work using Haskore and Fran for elementary teaching on the old Haskell.org website. Google's cache says the old URL was here but its now vanished:

www.haskell.org/edsl/campy/campy-2003-music.ppt

That sounds great!  If you do have an existing copy of the slides, I'd like to see them.  Especially the idea of using music for programming with a nice embedded DSL / combinator library would be amazing.

-- Chris

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On 28 January 2011 01:23, Chris Smith wrote: [TRUNC]

I did look at Haskore, and there's a lot to like about it; but also a lot to worry about.  The documentation talks about it only being able to do synthesis on Linux (but that documentation seems to be old; I wonder if this is still true); it definitely suffers from "wall of modules" syndrome ...

Hi Chris Note that Haskore-vintage and Henning's Haskore are now quite different. From the date I'd assume John Peterson's slides would have been using "vintage" Haskore (at the time it wouldn't have been called vintage, of course). Vintage Haskore generates MIDI files only, Paul Hudak has a large tutorial for vintage Haskore, its (probably) too long for kids but you could certainly crib a lot from it. Paul's also re-doing the "School of Expression" book to concentrate more on music - I think he's making drafts available. If you have Haskore specific queries, the Haskell-art list is better than Cafe as Paul is a regular commentator there. Best wishes Stephen

Chris Smith schrieb:

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 11:44 -0600, aditya siram wrote:

...

I was a little negative in my last message so maybe I can contribute something positive. If you're looking for a musical way to teach Haskell I did a Haskell music hackathon [1] about a year and a half ago. The idea was to use Haskell [2] to play music through a Supercollider music server [3] .

Well, it seems like music is a good possibility for part of it. We're talking about a weekly class for a year, so it'll go beyond that. I'm sure that whatever I do, I won't be able to prevent it ending with the programming of video games!

I did look at Haskore, and there's a lot to like about it; but also a lot to worry about. The documentation talks about it only being able to do synthesis on Linux (but that documentation seems to be old; I wonder if this is still true); it definitely suffers from "wall of modules" syndrome -- there's no obvious top-level module with a simplified interface that I can see... no starting point or anything beyond type signatures, a lot of abstraction, and the apparent existence of many different types all called named with a capital T. Maybe, though, I can wrap it in something more simple and usable.

Sorry for not-up-to-date documentation. I think that looking at the various examples is most helpful for a start. I can't provide a link to code.haskell.org since it is down. But there is an Example directory. And maybe: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskore

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 1/27/11 10:26 , Stephen Tetley wrote:

John Peterson had some nice work using Haskore and Fran for elementary teaching on the old Haskell.org website. Google's cache says the old URL was here but its now vanished:

www.haskell.org/edsl/campy/campy-2003-music.ppt

web.archive.org is your friend. - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk1E9WcACgkQIn7hlCsL25VcUACbBjYscWmlm5QaHGWooQyqb0o1 mUEAn0D5LXJK8Gt+B8/ShqQclbs8R2Gs =8EdW -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Hi, You said "Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance[...]" I guess it is true for imperative programmers... but are you saying that about kids that just know how to use a calculator? Cheers, Thu 2011/1/27 aditya siram :

Ye gods! A B & D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers.

Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication.

BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on crow with gusto.

-deech

[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?BondageAndDisciplineLanguage [2] http://scratch.mit.edu/

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 9:04 AM, Chris Smith wrote:

...

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

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_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe

Ye gods! A B & D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers.

Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication.

Begone, disbeliever! And listen to the gospel of Matthias Felleisen preaching the truth: http://vimeo.com/6631514 (presentation from ICFP 2009) The paper is "A Functional I/O System - or, Fun for Freshman Kids": http://www.ccs.neu.edu/scheme/pubs/icfp09-fffk.pdf Alas, it's about Scheme, but I am sure it would be both interesting and useful regardless. Cheers, /Niklas

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 10:26 PM, Chris Smith wrote:

Like I said in the original post, my initial reaction was to push for something like Python. But the kids are very clear; if I'm at all willing, they want to learn Haskell!

IMO the most important facet of education is motivation, which it sounds like the kids already have in spades. Therefore, your primary job is to feed and protect their enthusiasm while making it easier for them to learn what they want (and guiding them in the right direction). It sounds like whatever you were doing with GHCi was working, so I would build off of that and expand it to programs that require writing to disk, interact with one another (networking), and such. I remember when I was a kid, I wanted to be able to write things to disk so badly (I have no idea why), but to me that was what 'real' programming was all about. I agree that sound, animations, etc... are very sexy and if done right can increase their enthusiasm many fold, but it also has the ability to turn them off from the simple elegance of what first hooked their interest. So start simple and be attentive to what THEY enjoy and you will give them the most valuable programming knowledge of all: passion. Best of luck and keep us up to date on your blog/reddit posts! -- Jason M. Knight

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 10:47 AM, Chris Smith wrote:

Jason, thanks for the comments.  Unfortunately, I probably won't do blogs about it.  Hate to say it, but anyone who has read much outside of /r/haskell will surely agree it's irresponsible to write about children on Reddit.  And things I write on my blog are likely to end up on Reddit.

I have not read much outside of /r/haskell. Why is this irresponsible? Luke

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 1/27/11 10:28 , aditya siram wrote:

Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication.

Isn't there already a body of evidence that people who've never been exposed to procedural languages find functional programming to be much more natural? (I vaguely recall trying to teach someone at a summer camp what = did in BASIC; they were using the equational meaning, and "assignment" wasn't clicking with them at all.) - -- brandon s. allbery [linux,solaris,freebsd,perl] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (Darwin) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk1E9hIACgkQIn7hlCsL25WStwCgnCXonPchAQtXjmC1YOz8fGql NL4AnRZQXY4oIXMZ3I0yK6jVTZt6DOOY =i8cJ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 7:28 AM, aditya siram wrote:

Ye gods! A B & D [1] language for kids? At least give them a fighting chance [2] at becoming future developers.

Haskell's immutability is good for mathematics but doing anything else takes a great deal of up-front patience and perseverance, two very rare qualities in that demographic if my own childhood is any indication.

BTW I want to be wrong so if you do succeed with this I will feast on crow with gusto.

IMO, the "two very rare qualities" part is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Didn't a lot of us spend endless hours tinkering with Linux configurations or seeing how many ways there were to use the debugger to make the computer crash when we were teenagers (if we were lucky enough to have computers as teenagers, anyway)? Kids -- and other people -- do amazing things when no one tells them it's hard. To the OP, I think teaching Haskell to 11-13 year olds should if anything be easier than teaching it to undergrads. At that age, they're less likely to have absorbed social "math is hard" messages and less likely to have absorbed Real-Programmer-ish ideas about what languages they're supposed to be programming in or what languages are practical. Sounds like a joy! Also, if you haven't, check out the book _Mindstorms_ by Seymour Papert -- the particular programming paradigm he advocates is different, but there should be some good fundamental ideas to inspire you. Cheers, Tim -- Tim Chevalier * http://cs.pdx.edu/~tjc/ * Often in error, never in doubt "an intelligent person fights for lost causes,realizing that others are merely effects" -- E.E. Cummings

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 16:40 +0100, klondike wrote:

Two days ago I was referred to this project: http://wizbang.sourceforge.net/WizBang/WizBang.html The language is quite imperative but to me looks as a child friendly programming language due to its low complexity.

Thanks for this and other related suggestions. Really, though, I'm not looking to find a new language; and almost surely not one like WizBang. I do want to keep things light, interesting, and fun... a DSL inside of Haskell might be interesting. But the absolute last message I want to send is that I don't think they are ready for a real language. Not after they've already played with Haskell and GHCi for mathematics! -- Chris Smith