Hi Bianca,

It's clearer in the booklet but this project is aiming to make high school students productive with mms before they get to university to do a STEM degree - that is their motivation ;-) I agree that at a certain point the will (hopefully) find their own muse and dig deep into a sub-topic somewhere. My target audience is a young person that wants to use mma as their super-power at uni to give them the head space they need to deal with the rest of the chaos that the change from school to uni entails.

For that reason, my immediate objective is to get a typical STEM student productive for a STEM degree as fast as possible without knowing what subject they will end up taking higher level courses in. that drives my decision to focus mainly on built-in functions - I suspect that with 200-250 of these under their belt, they'll be both able to churn out lab reports and assignments, investigate new concepts and are well placed to move into functional programming if and when they need to.

Cool project! I haven't looked at your book yet, but let me just throw out an idea anyway: Wolfram Language is sufficiently high-level that you'll start learning highly domain-specific functions very early on.

Or in other words: What you do just a few hours into your learning journey may already depend on what you're interested in creating. You might want to solve integrals, or create a game, or do comparative text analysis for history class - these different paths will diverge very quickly. 250 common beginner functions seems like a very large number to me - although 50 is reasonable, paired with an introduction to the Documentation Center.

Have you considered featuring a very incomplete selection of highly diverse example topics in such a way that students can extrapolate an approach to their personal field of interest from that?

(Disclaimer: I'm not a qualified educator.)

Hello Joe, I am interested in your noob guide, Thanks!