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

[Jan Hlavacek <jhlavacek@sf.edu>]

On Tue, Apr 04, 2000 at 08:49:35PM -0700, bgfay wrote:
> Is there something like the old Basic that I could use in my math classroom to
> teach kids about basic algorithms?

I see that you got a lot of replies.  If you were asking about a
language for a computer programming class, I would agree that Python or
Scheme would be very good choices.  Or maybe you can try S-Lang.  Or
about anything else. 

For math class, I would recommend Logo.  One advantage is the geometry
connection through turtles. Not that there is anything logo-specific
about turtle graphics,  it is perfectly possible to add a turtle
graphics package to any other language.  The main reason is that logo is
really easy to learn,  you don't have to talk about any "computer
science" concepts at the beginning, it lets you to "smuggle them in"
later, but mainly, there is a lot of materials available for logo.  Logo
has been used for this purpose for several decades.  Look at
http://www.logofoundation.org/ and
http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/papers.html , for example.

There are both free and commercial versions of logo for various
paltforms.

> 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 would like to see what you found! ;-)

-- 
Jan Hlavacek                                            (219) 434-7566
Department of Chemistry                               Jhlavacek@sf.edu
University of Saint Francis               http://199.8.81.3/Jhlavacek/