[TOS] Teaching Programming in High School

[Matthew Jadud]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 09:09, Jan Wildeboer <jwildebo at redhat.com> wrote:
> The advantage of Arduino is that you can tap into the wisdom of a big
> community. You can invite people to explain, assist from that community. And
> share your results with the community.
>
> Having that integrated is key IMHO.

Absolutely. I'm not at all down on the Arduino (I'm currently
investing a lot of time and effort into the platform), but teachers
are Insanely Busy People. Unless you're prepared/able to invest time,
I don't think there are plug-n-play solutions for using the Arduino in
educational contexts at the moment.

I have some research to do before I write about this on the blag,
though. Mel pointed at a few resources that I'll echo there, but my
suspicion is that all of these resources assume you're able/willing to
devote hours to teaching yourself a lot. Bootstrapping a classroom of
20-30 students, working in groups of 2-3, into programming the Arduino
using ANSI C is... daunting at best.

As soon as I get through the next day or two, I'll try and capture
some of these ideas in a more coherent format.

Cheers,
Matt