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

[David McClamrock <mcclamro@concentric.net>]

On Tue, 04 Apr 2000, Brian G. Fay wrote:

>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 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? 

Hello Brian,

If you want something *basic* like Basic, and available on Linux systems
everywhere, why not try Bash, the most commonly used shell scripting language? 
It can do arithmetic functions, string manipulation, loops, conditionals, and
all that basic stuff (which I--a home schooler, hobbyist, and "recovering
Windows addict"--am gradually learning about in my spare time).  It could
probably get you going fairly fast in teaching the students, while providing a
good foundation for learning more complex languages.  From what I know of Perl,
it's a pretty complex, powerful, versatile language--meaning it contains a
whole lot of things your students wouldn't need to know to get going, and it
offers a whole lot of ways for programmers to write code that beginners can't
understand.  It is possible to teach Perl to beginning programmers, as in
Andrew L. Johnson's *Elements of Programming with Perl*--but even that book, I
think, would be over the heads of most middle-school students.  (If I can't
figure out many of those wild and crazy-looking "regular" expressions and
things like that in Perl--and I can't, at least not yet--then your students
probably couldn't either!)

The complete Bash online reference manual (about 300K bytes or so, much of
which you wouldn't need for teaching basic algorithms) is available at
<http://www.gnu.org/manual/bash/index.html>.

Dave "Pa" McClamrock