APL at Mill Hill School

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 20

Computer Education at Mill Hill is split into Information Technology (wordprocessing, spreadsheets, comms, DTP, etc.) which is taught on an MS-DOS system, and "Computing" in which we are free to write our own syllabus, so we are including this year a couple of lessons introducing APL to illustrate its potential.

We have just installed a class set of Archimedes 310 computers and were given a pre-release version of I-APL to try out. The pupils are in our first three years, 14 to 16 years old, doing courses of about 26 lessons p.a. Only one attempt has been made as yet to use APL for project purposes - the teacher involved is not an APL user, and is unwilling to launch pupils into an area where he cannot easily guide them.

Following this note is the worksheet we are about to use. It was trialled briefly with the computer club and a couple of end-of-term classes last year. It is submitted for publication as a stimulus rather than an end-product, and criticism, suggested amendments and extensions would be welcome. You may, gentle reader, feel inspired to redo the whole thing: if so please send the writer of these notes a copy!