Re: [school-discuss] K13-15 programming language

[Joel Kahn <jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx>]

Of the languages mentioned on the list that
you cite, I would suggest that you look at
Alice, Logo, and Squeak. I have not used the
most recent version of Alice; I hope they
have debugged it further since the last time
I did use it. Logo is, of course, available
in a huge number of different versions; if
you have the time to do the searching, you
will just have to see what is available for
the OS you're working with. As for Squeak
and Smalltalk: although that Wikipedia list
describes them separately, Squeak really is
*the* current manifestation of Smalltalk for
all practical purposes. (Scratch is actually
based on Squeak, by the way.)

Further candidates that are not on that list:

BASIC-256
http://kidbasic.sourceforge.net/

VPython . . .
http://www.vpython.org/

. . . and VPython's offshoot, PyGeo:
http://pygeo.sourceforge.net/

The last two deserve some further comment.
VPython was originally developed to teach
computer programming, math, astronomy,
physics, and similar stuff to university
undergraduates; its documentation &c reflect
this bias, unfortunately. However, if they
are properly introduced step-by-step, I am
confident that both VPython & PyGeo could
be very useful at the grade levels you are
aiming at. I think they also have enormous
possibilities for art education that have
not yet been explored properly.

One more thing: thanks for posting the link
to that list; there are several languages
on there I hadn't heard of.

Joel



       
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