The Education VECTOR

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

April 1990

Editor Alan Sykes

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.7 No.1. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association; for more information about the British APL Association, contact the Secretary: Anthony Camacho, [address omitted].

Contents¶

Editor:
Dr Alan Sykes,
c/o European Business Management School
Swansea University
Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP
Wales, UK

Editorial¶

Welcome to another edition of Education Vector. And thank you to all readers who took the trouble to reply to my questionnaire. To date, I have had 41 replies. Of these 41, 16 wished to discontinue receiving 'EV', 4 were members of the British APL Association who did not want to receive EV separately, and 19 wished to continue.

Of the 19 who wished to continue, 6 wished to become full members of the British APL Association, and 13 were prepared to pay £2 towards the cost of producing EV.

25 replies assessed the quality of EV as follows: 11 'good', 13 'helpful' and 1 'unhelpful'. Here are some specific comments that were made.

1. Please keep producing EV as it fills a gap - when you have teenagers interested in the language, it is not always easy to find material to maintain their interest.
2. Fine from my sideline interest - I don't use APL as a rule but the journal does allow me to view the progress of APL in Education - fine.
3. It gives some clever ideas, but more straightforward applications (rather than clever ones) would be appreciated.
4. Haven't got the time. (See the correspondence section for an interesting discussion of this theme.)
5. Written in a nice friendly style.
6. Wide variety of subjects required e.g. graphics, data entry forms and validation, discussion on coding/naming standards, how to integrate APL, structured programming, access to non-APL systems (whew! you need VECTOR as well!)
7. It's nice to see APL written in a way that is understandable by everyone (especially novices) rather than having code that takes 3 days to decipher!
8. Present form is good and helpful. I would like to suggest a full application related to teaching. Suppose you wanted to teach a subject (e.g. analysis of variance, laws of optics, genetics ...) what are the successive steps to follow from the idea to the package that the students would use in the classroom?

It is too early to say yet what the British APL Association will decide to do with EV in the light of the results of the questionnaire. (Incidentally, if you feel that the results above are unrepresentative and you haven't sent your reply, it is not too late to do so.) However I am confident that it will do all it can to support EV in its endeavours.

Clearly you have given me much food for thought, and I hope that in my last year as editor of Education Vector, some of your many valuable suggestions may be implemented. Please help me to achieve this by sending your contributions for circulation to the many people, at home and abroad who do receive, read, and apparently appreciate reading Education Vector. In this context, please note a slight change in the editorial address.