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mdlbearSince the kids have expressed an interest in learning HTML, website-building, and maybe even programming, I'm going to try to teach them. This should be interesting.
My plan is to start by having them set up home directories. We have three websites (internal, public, and the semi-public one on the DSL line), and I'll start by explaining the difference. Then I'll have them start on the internal site and create an index page using Emacs and
Next I'll have them set up a home directory on gc, and show them how to use
Then we get into programming. I really can't decide which would be better: javascript (which is ghastly, but you get immediate feedback in a web page), perl (great for server-side stuff, and I have plenty of sample code they can hack on, but it's ugly and finicky about syntax), python (said to be easy to learn, but I don't know it and disagree with many of its design features), smalltalk (known to be easy to learn), or lisp (trivial syntax -- I can teach it in ten minutes -- good debugger, and it's built into Emacs).
[Poll #309669] No flames, please, but suggestions will be welcome.
... edit 6/17 to correct spelling of Hackwarts (was ...orts)
My plan is to start by having them set up home directories. We have three websites (internal, public, and the semi-public one on the DSL line), and I'll start by explaining the difference. Then I'll have them start on the internal site and create an index page using Emacs and
html-helper-mode, which has menus and templates for all the common tags, and does indentation and syntax coloring. Let 'em play for a while.Next I'll have them set up a home directory on gc, and show them how to use
make (with my canned, spiffy, recursive upload makefile, which makes it easy) to upload. They probably won't want to get into the theory, which is OK -- it's only three keystrokes in emacs, given the household keybindings. Oh, and they'll have to have set up ssh keypairs at that point It'll be a little harder to get them onto the public site, located at my ISP -- I'll probably just give them write access to the appropriate part of the local mirror tree, and set up a cron job for updating. Probably won't matter until the end of the summer, anyway.There will probably have to be an advanced HTML lesson or two: tables, fonts, images; that kind of thing. And a little on CVS, the version-control system I'm using at the moment.
Then we get into programming. I really can't decide which would be better: javascript (which is ghastly, but you get immediate feedback in a web page), perl (great for server-side stuff, and I have plenty of sample code they can hack on, but it's ugly and finicky about syntax), python (said to be easy to learn, but I don't know it and disagree with many of its design features), smalltalk (known to be easy to learn), or lisp (trivial syntax -- I can teach it in ten minutes -- good debugger, and it's built into Emacs).
[Poll #309669] No flames, please, but suggestions will be welcome.
... edit 6/17 to correct spelling of Hackwarts (was ...orts)
