Re: [school-discuss] first programming language

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Robert Rittenhouse wrote:
> If you look at Squeak you might also look at Alice 
> (http://www.alice.org/) which is Java based and now runs on Linux. Note 
> both of these are environments and really independent of the OS.

I did a quick search of Python tutorials and found this one:

http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocpyth.htm

What really interested me was the difference between the traditional 
first lesson of printing "Hello World" in Python vs. Java:

Python:

>>> print "Hello World"
Hello World
>>>

Java:

class Hello1 {
  public static void main(String[] args){
    System.out.println("Hello World");
  }
}

For my elementary kids, I think Python would be much more preferable. 
Plus, I found this great set of videos of German youngsters doing Python 
using Rur-Ple and Easy GUI:

http://showmedo.com/videos/series?name=pythonJensFromKidsSeries

Best, Daniel

--
Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Georgia Open Source Education Foundation