Re: Need more pointers and wishes (fwd)

[Jan Hlavacek <lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu>]

I got this from Jan Hlavacek this morning and am sending it (and my response)
 to the mailing list with his permission.

On Fri, Dec 04, 1998 at 10:41:20AM -0500, Doug Loss wrote:
> I'm sure there are some programs that some of us know about that could
> be useful in either institutional or home-based education.  And I
> guarantee there are things people would like to see that aren't
> currently available.  Please send me (privately, at dloss@seul.org) your
> pointers and wishes, and I'll put them together into a weekly list.

I would really like to see some kind of multimedia version of logo,
something like microworlds or star logo,  or even comenius logo or
mswlogo.  There is of course the excellent ucblogo by Brian Harvey,  but
it is completely different kind of program.  We need something where
children can do animations,  music,  maybe 3d drawing like in mswlogo,
multiple turtles,  possibility to change turtle shape and so on.

There is quite a bit of discussion on the logo newsgroup and mailing
list about a program called Toontalk (http://www.toontalk.com/).  I
didn't have a chance to try it,  as it runs only on windoze, but it
seems fairly interesting.  I asked the author about possible Linux
port.  He is not opposed to it,  but he wrote that Toontalk depends
heavily on DirectX.  He doesn't know if there is any replacement of
DirectX on Linux.  Since I have no idea what DirectX does (it seems to
be some sort of microsoft graphics library),  I couldn't help him.

There is also another educational language,  ISETL.  See for example
http://www.math.purdue.edu/~ccc/distribution.html and
http://csis03.muc.edu/isetlw/isetlw.htm  (windoze version).
It doesn't really fit into K12 curriculum,  since it is a language for
learning "advanced" math (it's used for calculus,  abstract algebra,
discrete math and so on),  but I guess it can be used in some advanced
high school math classes.
It was originally developed under Unix,  and the Unix sources are still
available,  but they are rather out of date.   It shouldn't be that hard,
however,  to bring them up to date.  If somebody does that, the result
can easily be much better than than the windoze and mac versions.  As
far as I can tell,  it needs graphics support (may be even achieved by
piping stuff to gnuplot?),  better command line/history editor,  and
some minor tweaks of the language interpreter.  The interface isn't
meant to be fancy,  it should be easy to use and very simple.

--
Jan Hlav\'{a}\v{c}ek
lahvak@math.ohio-state.edu  (Blind Carbon Copies will bounce)
www: http://www.math.ohio-state.edu/~lahvak/


--
Doug Loss            An idealist is one who, on noticing that
dloss@csrlink.net    roses smell better than cabbage, concludes (717)
326-3987       that they will also make better soup.
H. L. Mencken