Editorial: “Train up a child …”

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 3

This issue of VECTOR unashamedly devotes several pages to various aspects of the I-APL project, of which I hope all our readers are by now at least aware. Although I-APL is a separate activity from any other organisation, it has already at the time of writing in early-November received backing from the British APL Association and from SIGAPL. The transatlantic nature of its support is reflected not only in the make-up of the I-APL committee, but also of those others involved in the development of the interpreter itself and of the infrastructure to ensure its success – the documentation, supporting material and the “business plan”; spawned in Manchester, I-APL should be developed by Dallas.

My direct knowledge of education is limited to my own experiences and to those of my close family and in particular my own children. As a mathematician, I cannot fail to see how much more appropriate an APL background would have been to my own education, than was the mixture of Algol and Fortran that constituted the norm before the days of micros and BASIC. However my views of the computing needs of today’s school-children are coloured more by what I have seen as an outsider looking in on my children’s education.

In general the teaching profession has shown considerable inventiveness and imagination in taking the microcomputer to heart. Of course there have been cases where the computer has been used trivially to mimic the teaching of arithmetic by rote, and of course it would be better if all schools had the resources to buy more computers. But equally there are many dedicated teachers who recognise the computer as a totally new type of teaching aid, that should not be used merely as a glorified adding machine. Also there is much innovative software available for the educational market – the Mary Rose project and the work done with LOGO would seem to be classic examples.

Above all though we must avoid the danger that all the school-children interested in computers become so accustomed to the BASIC approach to programming that they regard its looping, scalar techniques as sacrosanct. (It was Anthony Camacho, I think, at APL86 who expressed the fear that we are training people to be unable to use the benefits of parallel computers.) APL seems to have three strong advantages in the educational area. Structurally, it reflects the mathematical concepts being taught much more clearly than any other language; it is after all a sophisticated mathematical notation in its own right. As a calculating machine, it provides a powerful tool for pupils to use to support other work they may be doing – analysing experimental results, and so on. And for the teacher, its brevity should help in preparing functions, where appropriate copied from written material, to illustrate the work in hand. The speed with which results can be obtained with only a modicum of APL expertise must be a key factor in retaining the interest of youngsters whose attentiveness fades when faced with a daunting stream of PRINT$ IF THEN ELSEs.

What then can we as APL users do to assist the momentum of the I-APL band-wagon? The key factor is communication. The small core of educationalists in the APL community cannot expect personally to reach a large number of teachers; they can however attempt to concentrate their own resources on the key decision-makers – LEA Mathematics Advisers and the like. What the rest of us should be able to do is to contact those teachers we know personally, especially those with an interest in mathematics and computers, and tell them about I-APL. However we must give them a two-fold message – not only that a free APL interpreter is available, along with suitable supporting material, but also why it should be important to them.

Now we can all explain in our own way why APL helps us, but the niceties of component file systems and nested arrays may well be irrelevant to the class’s uses of computers. What we need to do between now and the start of the publicity drive in the Summer is to encourage those teachers already using APL to tell us lay-people what particular characteristics of APL are most relevant in the educational context. Then we have a real prospect of introducing APL effectively to a whole new generation.

“Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
Proverbs, xxii, 6

Dates for future issues of VECTOR¶