[school-discuss] Programming for Kids

[jj2kk4@xxxxxxxxx]

Thanks to Laurie Cohen for adding Alice to the
list of languages; I meant to include it but
it slipped by me. . . .

While I'm at it, there are a couple of other
things I wanted to mention in this area:

1. No discussion of programming for kids
would be complete without some mention of
Logo, which I assume many (most?) of you have
at least heard of. Regardless of your degree
of Logo experience, the Logo Foundation . . .

http://el.media.mit.edu/Logo-foundation/

. . . has stuff worth looking at, although
much of their material may not sit well with
hard-core FLOSS purists.

Logo-style features (pen drawing, turning
commands, &c) have shown up in a number of
other languages, such as Scratch. The last
time that I checked, there was some kind of
a Logo-related module included in the
standard distribution of Python, although
I don't have any recent details handy.

2. I wanted to elaborate a bit about my
suggestion that using multiple languages
could make a better curriculum. Consider
giving students the challenge of trying
to translate the functions/outputs of a
program from one language to another
language that has a vastly different
structure from the first language.
Think of a few examples:

VPython (3D in xyz coordinates)
vs.
Alice (3D using "plain English" commands)

Scratch ("Sprite" objects as primitives)
vs.
BASIC-256 (Constructing "objects" and
their motions from simpler elements)

VPython or Alice (3D primitives)
vs.
Scratch (2D primitives)

Logo
vs.
VPython, Alice, or BASIC-256. . . .

I trust you folks get the general idea.
I think the most productive experiments
would be those where a "pure" conversion
is flatly impossible, and the students
are forced to do a whole lot of creative
adaptation to get a running program in
the target language.

Have any of you already been working
along these lines in your classrooms?

Joel