Teaching kids Clojure + mathematics
Teaching kids Clojure + mathematics
Hi folks,
is anyone of you teaching their kids Clojure as I do? A couple of years ago I decided to home school my kids because I wanted to teach them programming in a lispy language in conjunction with mathematics as early as possible (7+ years of age, after finishing their first year in the elementary school). So, I made a private course for my kids and created a series of hand-drawn comic textbooks full of maths combined with all the lispy goodness.
I thought it would be a nice experiment as I was not sure if the concept of LFL—Lisp as First (programming) Language can really work. You know, there are these theories that before fully appreciating a lispy language, you have to experience the horrors of ‘garbage languages’ first… Also, Clojure is not exactly a pedagogical language, is it? At some point, I was thinking about creating my own Lisp dialect for the purpose. But I wanted something to support functional approach, lazy evaluation, and having a collection of nice data structures, so why bother making another language if Clojure suits my needs (almost) perfectly (there are some features that I do not like that much but I guess nothing is perfect) and, yes, my spare time was also a limiting factor.
I have been doing this for five years now and it has been a fascinating journey. I really like how it works together with teaching maths and boosts abstract thinking. Some of my friends showed interest in what I was doing (apparently, they wanted the same fine education for their kids), so I decided to make an official series of books, the first was just published and can be purchased on Lulu (the plan is to make 3 volumes per year). In addition to that, I will be posting ‘my pedagogical notes’ (and later problem-oriented web-based programming environments) on Patreon for those who would like to follow this path. This project takes a substantial amount of my time, so any support from you fellow lispers is highly appreciated!
Project home with book preview: https://prog-mat.com
Any thoughts?
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I love this idea! I have wanted something like this for a long time. I taught a high school CS/logic course and I have many pedagogical problems with Java which was the instructional language we used. I'm also a new father and I have been daydreaming about how I would homeschool my daughter when the time comes (if she is receptive to the idea).
I have already sought out something like this and I came across Project Bootstrap which uses Racket:
https://www.bootstrapworld.org/index.shtml
They have also built a no-fuss web IDE for young students:
https://www.wescheme.org/openEditor
Their goal is to reinforce mathematics education with programming. Their resources are quite good from what I have seen! Take a look at an early sample lesson from their algebra course: