Re: Resources for teaching a child Ada ?

["chris.danx" <spamoff.danx@ntlworld.com>]

faust wrote:

> My 12 year old wants to learn Ada 
> ( He actually wanted to learn Java or Pascal but I convinced him that
> Ada is superior to both. 

I'm saying nothing about Pascal (haven't used a modern variant, still 
like TP though), but will say that Java is as good as Ada depending on 
what you want to do.  For some things Ada sucks, for some things Java 
sucks.  They're not superiour to one another just better at one thing 
which the other isn't.  I would agree that Ada is (IMO) a better 
teaching language *in this context*, because you don't have to get into 
OO early, (java) packages, shallow copying, or stuff like that.  Just my 
opinion (no flame war please).

I often think language superiority is 90% personal preference, 9% 
problem domain, 1% technical.


> Could anyone recommend a suitable text ?
> (Preferably online. )

No text (though John English's online text is very good - see Adapower 
for a link), but something to make it more interesting.  Jewl or 
AdaGraph*!  The thing that kept my interest when I was learning to 
program (around the same age) was graphics and stuff like that.  Text 
input interested me for all of five minutes, then I wanted to do 
something fun and playing with the graphics windows in Metacomco Basic 
(Atari ST) was it.  After a month of Basic I got a pc with turbo pascal 
and the first thing I did was explore graph.tpu and do mad stuff with 
circles, lines, squares and what not.  Make graphs of inputs and things 
like that.

The tutors at Uni knew that people liked graphics, gui stuff and 
exploited it to make it fun.  People hated the text io stuff but the 
graphics stuff they did held their interest.  We had a number of 
problems to solve which people liked.

One was to navigate a map with square cells and walls to get to the 
exit, another to land a rocket on a pad from a (fixed) launch position - 
in fact there was a crate of beer for the one who landed it in the 
shortest time; probably not a suitable reward for a twelve year old :) - 
and the other was planets orbiting the sun (just the earth, then with 
the earth and moon, then the same with darksides on the earth and moon - 
the darkside of the moon was tricky).



Merry Christmas,
Chris


p.s. AdaGraph -> Jewl might be a good progression.  Adagraph is just 
drawing in a window, but Jewl is a (simple) GUI toolkit.  Once your son 
had some experience with Ada he might want to explore GUIs and Jewl 
would be good for that, it's very easy to work with and doesn't bog you 
down with some of the concepts of bigger GUI kits (which is a task in 
itself).


*if it's Linux/Unix you'd need to write your own or write a wrapper 
round some GtkAda stuff to make it simple enough for a beginner to get 
to grips with.


-- 
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