kirby urner wrote: > Put another way: what I want for South African kids is a reading > knowledge of Python. I don't much care how that's gussied up on a > bltblt canvas, what bells and whistles get used. At the heart of it, > Python is simply ASCII source code that we know how to read, or don't. > > The target fluency we're working to cultivate is at that level, not at > the level of which mouse buttons to click, which dialog boxes to open > (good discussion with Alan Kay about "modal windows" over beers @ > JurysDoyle). Navigating the interface isn't irrelevant (gotta learn > that too) but it's not a core language in and of itself. The focus is > more Scheme than DrScheme, admirable though that packaging may be (I > find it admirable). > > Likewise, I want Squeak to be about, among other things, developing a > reading knowledge of SmallTalk. It's not like you have to make a > career out of being a SmallTalk programmer. It's more like we're > ploughing through Shakespeare, learning what a different English was > like, developing backward compatibility -- or Cervantes or whatever. > Alice in Wonderland.
Is the idea to teach programming? That seems wrong for any inclusive curriculum. Programming-the-skill will never be relevant to most of these children. As a way of teaching a larger set of ideas about abstraction, I think programming is a great medium. But it's only a useful skill for a small set of students. One thing that I think Logo gets really right is the insistence (cultural as much as anything) that it isn't a language for teaching programming, it's for teaching *with* programming. -- Ian Bicking / [EMAIL PROTECTED] / http://blog.ianbicking.org _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
