Tim Kerby wrote: > We have been told the PIC will be used in schools in Scotland after > much persuading on both my part and my teachers to the Scotish > Examination Board. Unfortunaly, Andy Cooper .... feels that assembly > should be left to university although schools manage happily with 16 > year olds on 6502 assembly (and all the hex conversion and manual > programming). We would like to drop this age to 13 or 14. Do you > think assembly would be suitable if appropriate coursework and > reference was provided and perhaps only learning the 15 or so core > instructions. Tim: In my opinion, PIC assembly language would ABSOLUTELY be suitable for 13-14 year old students. It's funny... I was just discussing this very subject with Steve Wozniak. His young students (younger than yours) are already wriing programs using the Macintosh's Hypercard "language", and we came to the conclusion that most of them could easily handle assembly language. Our conversation centered around teaching 6502 assembly language, since he (obviously) is pretty familiar with it, but it applies equally (if not more strongly) to teaching the PIC assembly language. The key thing, I think, is that the students must already be proficient in at least the basics of algebra... Without that knowledge, they'll find the concept of variables difficult to understand. Also, they'll need to be fluent with the associative, commutative, and distributive properties of addition and multiplication. Additionally, a year of Algebra will have taught them how to transform a stated problem into a mathematical or logical solution, then to break it down into a progression of small steps in order to solve it. If your students already have programming experience (in BASIC or whatever), they should be able to pick up assembly language VERY quickly, but even if they don't, it shouldn't take very long. For example, I've taught PIC assembly language to motivated adult students with no prior programming experience. It took about two weeks for them to become fluent enough to translate simple algorithms (for multiplication, division, etc.) into assembly... A month later, one of them was making money writing PIC software as a part-time freelance programmer. The more interactive you can make the programming process, the better... An emulator and oscilloscope at each student's desk would be the ideal, of course, but since that's impossible, you should at least have simulators and some sort of prototyping boards with pushbuttons, LEDs, etc. You also need a VERY easy, VERY fast means of programming PICs... Nothing slows the learning process more than being unable to quickly and easily try new code. Take a look at the "Easy PIC'n" book... It's written for absolute beginners and might give you some curriculum ideas. Good luck... Let me know how things work out. -Andy === Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com === Fast Forward Engineering - Vista, California === === Custodian of the PICLIST Fund -- For more info, see: === http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499/fund.html