[seul-edu] Long, long ago...

[bgfay <rid24199@ride.ri.net>]

Back when I was a kid, our middle school purchased one (count em') Apple IIc. I
started playing around with it and got to know a little Basic programming. I
work in an all Mac school now, but have long since lost touch with the Apple
platform. I'm just now getting into Linux and I have a question.

Is there something like the old Basic that I could use in my math classroom to
teach kids about basic algorithms?

I got to thinking of this last week when a friend and I were trying to remember
what the summation of 1/x evaluated from x=0 to x=infinity is. I remember
writing a very simple loop in middle school to figure this out--I remember
because a friend and I tricked the librarian into thinking we had shut down the
computer and let it run the process all night. We each served a one-hour
detention for risking the destruction of the device.

I want to get started with this sort of thing with my middle school students
now. I imagine that something like perl or some such would do the trick. Do
people have specific suggestions of free software that I could begin learning
and resources to help me learn it? 

I sure hope so. Thanks.

-- 
Brian G. Fay on Linux
UCAP: http://www.ucap.org