Is there a "canonical language" for exercises for beginners?

Is there a "canonical language" for exercises for beginners?

[Eduardo Ochs]

Hi list,

Most CT books have lots of elementary exercises whose solutions
consist of defining morphisms, functors, natural transformations, etc,
and doing calculations with them and proving things. Is there a
"canonical language" for solving those exercises?

Here's why I am asking. I am giving a course without any formal
prerequisites that is mostly an introduction to lambda-calculus,
intuitionistic propositional logic, and CT, and the students - most of
them have very little mathematical background - have a lot of
difficulty when they have to write down answers of exercises... the
way that I found to keep them from spending far too much time on
trying different ways of writing was to convince them to use untyped
lambda-calculus to define things whenever possible, but that feels a
bit like cheating...

So, here are some question for the people who have taught very basic
courses on CT: how did you teach your students to write? And what
resources did you use?

   Cheers and thank in advance =),
     Eduardo Ochs


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