[vga805]

I agree with the overall sentiment. I taught for awhile and was happy with the approach I came up with. Students start out with the basics of learning how to loop through a list to transform some data. Once they have looping down, they are introduced to map and other built in methods. But, before using these methods, they are tasked with rewriting them using the looping they've learned.

Once they've "earned" the usage of the built in methods, they are tasked with rewriting them again, but this time without using any kind of looping. I give them a bit of time to think about how they may do this. Very few students get it but the plan is to live code it myself as an introduction to recursion. The task is still the same: to rewrite the map method. So the context for their intro to recursion is something they've become quite familiar with. It seems to have worked well.

[deathanatos]

> but this time without using any kind of looping.

See, to me, recursion is a kind of looping.

[vga805]

Yeah fair enough, I agree, I could have worded that differently. They couldn't use any of the looping they'd come to learn up to that point.