On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Edward Cherlin <echer...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sun, Apr 11, 2010 at 21:03, Andrew Harrington <ahar...@luc.edu> wrote: >> Well put David. >> >> My choices are always about me and a particular situation. I would not >> teach J to beginners > > I would use the +-*% (+-×÷) subset of J in first grade for arithmetic, > alongside Turtle Art (with stack tiles), and Etoys, including > Scratch. By third grade, we could introduce programming in J/APL, > Logo/LISP, FORTH, Python, and Smalltalk. At some point, we could show > how each represents the same internal parse tree in quite different > textual forms. What the LISPers call "syntactic sugar". This is a > fundamental Computer Science concept. >
I'd like to see a school form around your druthers, with ways to facilitate turnover, so those most advantaged by this approach would have some chance to (a) discover this for themselves and (b) keep a slot in an initially rare environment. One would hope we might learn enough from your approach to transfer some of what's working to other sites. Your school of thought would spread in proportion to its achieving results, but without this stultifying demand that everything be proven risk-free before any pilots get started (as if the status quo were a result of such iron-clad assurances). A vicious circle: don't try anything until you can prove it's not in error. This results in paralysis, in nothing being tried. Nothing ventured, nothing gained -- we've all heard that a million times. Hey, I'd've provided you with space and a budget years ago. We'd be reading of your stellar results in the electronic papers by now! All that being said, I'd also sponsor other schools with quite different approaches. Television programming is even more powerful than computer programming in a lot of ways, as it feeds directly into the optic nerve thereby filling human memory banks, helping condition responses. What a powerful medium! Some schools need to put more focus on TV skills, lest all the effective recruiting commercials be for competing services. Maybe the math curriculum includes some J, but with a starry sky backdrop, with class content projected to a sheet strung between tree trunks (or is the sheet itself some kind of LCD?). You had to hike 20 miles to get here. A lot of the databases you study are about local flora and fauna. Some kind of boarding school? International students? Public? Federally funded? Lets fight early onset diabetes by ending discrimination against physical activity as intrinsically "non-mathematical". "Math is an outdoor sport" is one of our slogans. >> or to people not crunching a lot of mathematical stuff >> regularly, but for the professional statisticians and electronic traders I >> know, J is a fabulous language, and very worth the modest learning curve. > > J would enable children to crunch data sets easily, allowing a radical > deepening of every subject. The learning curve would be very modest > when integrated with arithmetic and elementary science, and applied to > languages, history, geography, health, and gym. > Glad you mentioned health and gym. Doing the math around joules and calories, relating these to food values (content): lots of crunchy data sets to work with, as you say, lots of working out. The chemistry of food, digestion, and nutrition, includes cooking, learning to cook. Where those TV-making skills come in handy: producing cooking shows for the school servers. Using Python for a graphing calculator in math class need to not be special, extraordinary, honors or advanced. It's just the obvious and everyday thing we should be doing already. Besides, maybe we're not going to college right away? Other services calling, and offering their own training? Given how FUBAR the Global U is right now, one could understand why creating high debt for high tuitions simply to further over-specialize our students might be considered counter-productive. How about scholarships for veterans to enter nursing, other medical professions? The health professions are ravenous for computing and data services. My daughter is the Portland district champion debater at 15, having started her high school's team in the first place. I worry though: why waste her talents at some backward academy that doesn't even teach about tetrahedral mensuration? How many dead mineshaft canaries does it take I wonder? Maybe by the time she graduates we'll have some respectable colleges out there. >> J is an interesting case. Iverson did not totally open up the source. > > There is a published version of the source for an earlier version of > J, without the IDE, graphics, and so on. I have a copy. There has been > some talk of creating a Free Software version, but no activity that I > know of. However, Iverson's son Eric is considering GPLing some > version of J in support of One Laptop Per Child and Sugar Labs. I need > to bother him about it again, because I am about to apply for two XO > 1.5 units to use in preparing an introductory text on electricity. It > will use the built-in digital oscilloscope function (Measure) on the > XO, among other things, and will explain how to build and take data > from measuring instruments. I would be interested in working with > Pythonistas on a version using numpy and scipy. I'm still pretty hands-off with the XO despite having two of them, and even though I promote OLPC extensively through most excellent photography and journaling. The XO is for young children whereas I tend to not have much opportunity to work with those age groups. I tend to work with teens and older. All youth should be working on motor skills, both gross and fine, so it's important to me that computers not mess up the diet and exercise balance. The idea of a hand-cranked XO was always intriguing. Didactic challenge courses involving interactive electronics that double as physical work-outs -- designers getting into that are in on the ground floor of something big? Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
