Sigh. Every time I write this node, for some reason, I forget to hit "sumbit" after previewing. Hopefuly I'll stop being idiotic and plauged by poor server response times.

There are two important parts to teaching programming, esp. at a HS level. They are breaking down the problem into smaller pieces, and finding the solutions to those smaller pieces using the resources available (experementation, existing knowlage, reference materials, and other people). Actualy adding to their knowlage is a fairly minor piece of the puzzle. Fornatly, these are things that can be taught by a nonprogrammer; they are the same skills that any sort of problem-solving requires, which is why they are such important skills to teach.

The reason that your post, riceWind, made me think of this view is quite simple: perlmonks is a very important place to find reference and other people to help solve those refactored problems. Students should be shown perlmonks... not only will this help them with the process of learning perl, and learning to program, it will keep them from going here to ask "here's my homework problem, how do I do it", unless they are total idiots.