» Monday, 30 June A.D. 2008
recursive books for children
When Jonathan was visiting for Gamefest, I mentioned teaching programming by starting out with recursion and introducing iteration as a special case later on. He expressed skepticism that anybody did things this way. At this point, I happily expounded on The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, which teaches things precisely this way and was used in CS1 (6.001) at MIT for many years. Other books/courses from Indiana University etc. do things the same way.
I am happy to note that there are even children's books that do this. The classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, provides a basic introduction in function calling and recursion for your young child. To wit:
- The book on the bunny's bedside stand is Goodnight Moon;
- The Runaway Bunny, by the same two people, sits on the bookshelf at the far left of the room;
- The painting of the three bears contains a smaller picture of the cow jumping over the moon. The full-sized picture hangs over the fireplace, of course;
- Finally, a drawing from The Runaway Bunny hangs over the bookshelf at the far left of the room.
The kiddos are well on their way to learning Scheme as their first computer language!
posted by Nate @ 11:29PM