The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 25

By the time this column appears the course for teachers in Winchester will have taken place and I hope more enthusiasts will be helping to fuel the APL fires. When teachers comment that one of the things which is required to further the progress of APL in education is a newsletter or journal to communicate APL matters, it is satisfying to be able to tell them that Vector can supply the need and is now in its fourth year of successful publication. Furthermore issue 4.3 (two numbers ahead) is to concentrate on education.

The readers of this magazine fall broadly into three categories: those who use APL as a routine tool in their workplace, those whose business it is to market APL and related products, and those in whom APL stirs up an urge to communicate whatever it is of beauty, ingenuity or delight that brought about their first glorious APL rapture. At the risk of using overtly emotive words these might be styled the APL artisans, salesmen and idealists respectively. Or to make a musical analogy, the categories correspond to professional musicians, impresarios and connoisseurs (dilletanti?) – and this may perhaps improve the emotive balance! Of course these categories are not mutually exclusive, and readers will no doubt be able to identify people in their acquaintance who fall into at least two of them. St. Paul made the point that the soundness of an organisation is related to the balance of attributes and skills of its members, and this is no less true of the British APL Association than of the early church.

Now the purpose of this discussion is to make the point that so far it is the first two categories of membership which have made the running in our Association, largely because the cost of APL systems has ruled out the possibility of “idealist APL” gaining more than a slender foothold. With the advent of I-APL however, this barrier has been broken, and the riches which have excited and stimulated people fortunate enough to have easy access to APL are now available to a much larger potential audience. How will this audience react to the bounty? One measure will be the volume of contributions to these pages, and the hope is that the Education Vector will become not just a few lines of comment, but a valuable means of exchanging hints, experiences, ideas, algorithms and so on.

To finish on a practical and specific note, Professor Alan Hawkes reports from Swansea that the APL workspaces which are used in the Statistical Computing course now contain help files for the course-specific functions. Typing help 'histogram' produces suitable student assistance on how to use the histogram function. Then, when it is time to exercise statistical understanding, self-marking functions are called which as well as generating a degree of randomness in the questions, leave a record in a file. The teacher can thus assess which parts of the course caused most trouble and are worth trying to improve or extend (and which could be shortened without causing too much extra difficulty). It isn’t that this couldn’t be done in any other computing language – but can you think of any in which it would be a realistic possibility?