Re: Grabbing Mindshare in the Student Population for Ada

[Mr Adam G Craggs <adam.craggs@baesystems.com>]

I guess as you metion ADA you must be wanting to use it in your teaching. As i
think the areas which are metioned in your attachment could be covered by
other languages/environments more easily (eg. flash ...). I have seen some
interesting work with ada to teach programming.

But it depends on what part of programming you would like to teach.

An example project analysing a web log: I have done this when I was fairly new
to ada using a simple graphics library. Part 1 was just text based reading in
an input file of websites visited and writing out various stats. Part 2
drawing various charts with the graphics library.

For example as part of a small group of programmers - 5 we implemented a
programming teaching tool. Although this is not based in Ada I did see some
ada wrappers doing a similar sort of thing as part of the reasearch i did on
the web before starting it.

The main idea was to teach control flow so if else, loop, conditions in and
event based environment using a robot, and a graphical environment for
programming this was going to be a public exibit so no typing was alowed it
had to be fast and easy to use. To build the robot we used a lego kit called
lego mindstorms. But maybe if you want people to type the programs as was the
case with the ada wrappers then thats great.

I think if the effort is made many things are possible and i am sure rewards
will be seen. A simple example is extrapolating from the situation one of my
lecturers used to talk about spanners and this made people laugh alot and i am
sure they rememebered more of what he said than someone who just went straight
into explanations of librarys and such.

Kent Paul Dolan wrote:

> Here, from a posting in comp.lang.logo, is a viewpoint entirely
> different from mine (and probably lots more valid) on what it takes to
> engage the mind of CS students today.  Can Ada be wedged in here
> somehow, or extended with libraries to make the stuff described here
> possible for new Ada programmers?
>
> http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/guzdial/uploads/17/CACM_Nintendo_Generation.pdf
>
> FYI.
>
> xanthian.
>
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