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    It is a fallacy to claim that teaching a "real" language is the way to provide real-world relevance. It is the teacher's job to show how the "toy" language relates to real-world skills. Learning to juggle by starting with knives does not mean you are learning more relevant juggling skills. Commented Aug 26, 2011 at 19:50
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    @benzado You misunderstood my point. If you learn a toy language you have to transfer your skills to make them relevant to real-world problems. My whole point was that this transfer is an additional indirection that actively prevents some people from learning. Different people learn in wildly different ways, and some people really need this immediacy. Learning to juggle with knives isn’t the same thing. The real analogy would be with learning to program by writing a live missile guiding system as the first project, and I never suggested that. Commented Aug 27, 2011 at 9:06
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    I get your point. We just disagree. I think the transfer is important, it requires that the student has a deeper understanding than one who has a successful guessing strategy (e.g., one who "solves" word problems by picking out numbers and plugging them into the formulas in the beginning of the chapter). In other words, if they can't transfer what they learned, they never learned it in the first place. To keep students motivated, you just have to choose the right problems, which is important regardless of language, "real" or "toy". Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 16:01
  • @benzado Transfer is important, no argument there. But it’s a whole ’nother disciplin that needs to be taught, and some students don’t possess it. Besides, the “deeper understanding” part is also true, but also besides the point: this is already an advanced state that needs to be reached. Once the students have learned “it”, they can transfer it. But first they need to learn, and in order to do that, some students need relevance. Transfer comes later. Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 16:16
  • In math edu (where I have a tiny amount of experience), "Learning without Understanding" is a big problem: a focus on how to do it without why. My claim is that if you teach the concepts of programming, a toy language will do fine, and if you succeed, the transfer to a "real" language won't be hard. (If transfer is hard, you taught procedures, not concepts.) A toy environment doesn't prevent people from learning, but it does requires good lesson planning to be engaging. (I like this thread but I think we've crossed over into discussion territory and the moderators will be displeased.) Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 19:03