Re: Filesystems for kids
I don't know where you get the idea that files, hierarchical file systems, and text editors are simple concepts. I would be willing to discuss introducing the Linux file system in middle school, but our issue is programming for third-graders, or even earlier. Preschoolers can grasp the ideas behind turtle art by acting the part of the turtle. Where would you have them begin? Filesystems are not very hard to grasp. Do not underestimate first to third-graders. I think I've mentioned this before, but here in the Philippines we have streetkids pooling money to take turns playing games in low-cost internet cafes, (rates of about $0.40 an hour or so) and I have personally seen 5-7 year old steetkids playing the 3D first-person shooter game Counter-Strike and the real-time strategy game Command and Conquer 3, things which are much much complex than simple windows folders. Third-graders are what, 8-year olds? Filesystems should be no problem for them at all. It's very simple to explain: just show them to concept of books/notebooks or folders in a shelf or bag. -- carlos nazareno http://twitter.com/object404 http://www.object404.com -- core team member phlashers: philippine flash actionscripters http://www.phlashers.com -- poverty is violence ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Filesystems for kids
On Sat, May 21, 2011 2:17 am, Carlos Nazareno wrote: I don't know where you get the idea that files, hierarchical file systems, and text editors are simple concepts. I would be willing to discuss introducing the Linux file system in middle school, but our issue is programming for third-graders, or even earlier. Preschoolers can grasp the ideas behind turtle art by acting the part of the turtle. Where would you have them begin? Filesystems are not very hard to grasp. Do not underestimate first to third-graders. Preschoolers, I said. Where would you have preliterate preschoolers start? I think I've mentioned this before, but here in the Philippines we have streetkids pooling money to take turns playing games in low-cost internet cafes, (rates of about $0.40 an hour or so) and I have personally seen 5-7 year old steetkids playing the 3D first-person shooter game Counter-Strike and the real-time strategy game Command and Conquer 3, things which are much much complex than simple windows folders. Just like the famous Hole-in-the-Wall computer in India. Yes indeed, motivation. Game designers are remarkably good at it. It is also true that one-year olds learn significant fractions of whole human languages, among other things, based on inborn motivation. What is the reinforcement for third-graders to learn a file system when XOs provide the Journal? Certainly that will work for programmers, after they are comfortable with programming on a small scale, and need to advance to multiple file apps, and understand where libraries live. Who in the preschool to third grade age group wants to know badly enough, and why? A single folder is simple. The entire Windows or Linux file system is insanely complex. For one thing, essential system files have different names and locations in every version of Windows, and in many Linux distros, and sometimes in successive versions of the same distro. Third-graders are what, 8-year olds? Filesystems should be no problem for them at all. It's very simple to explain: just show them to concept of books/notebooks or folders in a shelf or bag. Or even a filing cabinet. Except that none of these models is hierarchical. How do you explain that? Yes, it's trivial to explain containers and contents, as long as you don't care whether the children can find anything in the hierarchy. Here is a simple exercise for you. You are to imagine that you are helping an amazing third-grader understand how the filesystem relates to Sugar activity development, packaging, QA, and deployment, since it is all so simple to you. 1. Which is your favorite Linux distro? Does it use apt or yum? 2. Tell me all of the locations where Sugar files are installed in that distro. Activity and system code, configuration, libraries, fonts, documentation, icons, graphics, .po files, Journal entries, log files, and anything else included or generated. 3. Tell me all of the path specifications on your system that enable Sugar activities to find their files, or files from other packages that they are dependent on. 4. Now repeat for a distro using the other packaging system. 5. Send me the results. 6. Tell me what Sugar tools you would tell your third-grader to use to perform this exercise on an XO. Terminal and what? Be specific. What commands do you recommend? How do you expect this child to find out about them? I am in the process of performing this exercise, and intend to publish the results. Simple, yes, but not easy. Alternatively, if you think you understand instructional design and child development sufficiently, you can come to http://booki.treehouse.su the Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks server, and write a guide to the Linux filesystem for third graders. You may remix and rewrite material from the Command Line book I helped write for adults and high-school students. http://booki.flossmanuals.net/command-line/edit/ -- carlos nazareno http://twitter.com/object404 http://www.object404.com -- core team member phlashers: philippine flash actionscripters http://www.phlashers.com -- poverty is violence ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Mokurai (#40664;#38647;/#2343;#2352;#2381;#2350;#2350;#2375;#2328;#2358;#2348;#2381;#2342;#2327;#2352;#2381;#2332;/#1583;#1726;#1585;#1605;#1605;#1740;#1711;#1726;#1588;#1576;#1583;#1711;#1585; #1580;) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] Turtles All The Way Down
On Fri, May 20, 2011 9:32 pm, Gonzalo Odiard wrote: The question is: does this really have educational value? Turtles all the way down is a great slogan, and a fine way to teach a graduate-level class on compiler technology, See * The Anatomy of LISP, by John Allen, and LISP machines, for LISP all the way down to the hardware. * http://domino.watson.ibm.com/tchjr/journalindex.nsf/600cc5649e2871db852568150060213c/641aa395fee3dd2c85256bfa006859fc!OpenDocument A Formal Description of System\360, by Adin Falkoff in the original pre-APL Iverson Notation, and Digital Systems: Hardware Organization and Design, by Frederick J. Hill Gerald R. Peterson for APL all the way down, also to the hardware. Specifically AHPL, A Hardware Programming Language. * SOAR (Smalltalk on a RISC) at UC Berkeley for Smalltalk all the way down to the hardware. * FORTH microprocessors such as Forth Multiprocessor Chip MuP21 http://www.ultratechnology.com/p21.html I would be interested to know of any other examples of hardware implementation of a programming language. (Not the Algol-optimized and COBOL-optimized Burroughs machines; real hardware implementations.) but I feel that the higher-level UI for tile-based program editing is the really useful thing for tablet computing. I'm a compiler geek and love the grungy underbelly of this stuff, but I keep reminding myself I should really be spending more time building a beautiful fluffy surface. I once used a tile-based UI in a commercial database program. It was horrible once we got past the toy examples. You are doing the right question I remember here No silver bullet [1] Different languages, different levels of abstraction, need different interfaces, and text is powerfull interface. May be is not the best interface to start to program, but surely graphic block are not the best interface to do programs of more than 400 of blocks. Of course. I would say that perhaps 40 or 50 blocks is a reasonable limit. After that, you should be writing subroutines to go in Python blocks, and not very long after transition to pure Python. Gonzalo [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 10:30 AM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.orgwrote: I've done a little more work on Turtles All The Way Down, which I (very briefly) discussed at EduJam. I actually wrote a garbage collector in TurtleScript for TurtleScript on Sunday. Brief writeup here: http://cananian.livejournal.com/64140.html and exhaustive mind-numbing detail here: http://cscott.net/Projects/TurtleScript/ No actual turtles yet! I'm going to have to fix that soon. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net ) ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) i...@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel -- Edward Mokurai (#40664;#38647;/#2343;#2352;#2381;#2350;#2350;#2375;#2328;#2358;#2348;#2381;#2342;#2327;#2352;#2381;#2332;/#1583;#1726;#1585;#1605;#1605;#1740;#1711;#1726;#1588;#1576;#1583;#1711;#1585; #1580;) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [IAEP] Turtles All The Way Down
I'm familiar with the processors designed for specific high-level languages. There was another generation of them built for Java (microblaze, picoblaze, etc) and some of those are even still commercially significant (they run Java subsets on smart cards). I'm not terribly interested in those processors. More in tune with the turles all the way down agenda is the work done on compiling high level languages to hardware. It's not that the hardware chipset runs turtlescript (that's not really giving you any additional insight into the operation of the hardware), but that the hardware is *described* in turtlescript. I've made some modest contributions to this in the distant past (http://flex.cscott.net/SiliconC/paper.pdf). That said, there is *zero* chance that this work will result in hardware suitable for the kids we care about. So let's stop talking about it. I once used a tile-based UI in a commercial database program. It was horrible once we got past the toy examples. [...] Of course. I would say that perhaps 40 or 50 blocks is a reasonable limit. After that, you should be writing subroutines to go in Python blocks, and not very long after transition to pure Python. Let's find out. I've written almost 4,000 lines of code in my tile based language so far. So far I've been typing it. I hope to leave the keyboard behind soon. And then we'll see whether I agree with you or not. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net ) ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Raspberry Pi $25 computer
FYI. Anybody who would like to port Sugar to a $25 computer (requiring only monitor, mouse, and keyboard) should contact Eben, and let us know too. -- Forwarded message -- From: Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com Date: Sat, May 21, 2011 at 22:10 Subject: Re: [Sur] linux system por $25 To: Eben Upton eben.up...@gmail.com On Sat, May 21, 2011 at 12:22, Eben Upton eben.up...@gmail.com wrote: Hi Edward Thanks for your mail, and apologies for the delay in replying. The devices should be available to the general public later in the year; I'll add you to our mailing list, and will keep you posted as we get closer to launch. Thank you. We've heard of Sugar, but need to find out more about it. Do you think it's suitable for a machine with limited processing power and only 256MB of RAM? That's what it was designed for. http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specifications AMD Geode 433 Mhz processor 256M RAM Fedora Linux http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Getting_Started http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities Cheers Eben Upton Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation Follow us @Raspberry_Pi on Twitter On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Edward Cherlin echer...@gmail.com wrote: Your Web site asks Do you have open-source educational software we can use? The answer is Yes. Sugar education software runs on a variety of Linux distributions, including Ubuntu. It is currently in the hands of more than 2 million children. We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. Sugar includes Python and Smalltalk (Etoys). One Laptop Per Child XO computers also run Open Firmware, written in FORTH, and including the complete FORTH development library, the editor, and an assembler. OFW is available for systems based on ARM processors. The Sugar Labs Replacing Textbooks project, which I started recently, will include a variety of materials for teaching programming and Computer Science, and for applying those languages to every school subject. We have compiled a list of successful projects for teaching programming in the elementary grades, including projects using Python, Smalltalk, Logo, LISP, BASIC, and APL. The real question is one that Seymour Papert asked in 1970: Can we design an environment in which children learn math and programming languages as readily as they learn human languages, largely from each other? Some of us think so, and we are working on it. I will be happy to answer further questions, or to direct you to those who know more about some aspects of Sugar than I. -- Forwarded message -- From: Sean DALY sdaly...@gmail.com Date: Fri, May 6, 2011 at 11:28 Subject: Re: [Sur] linux system por $25 To: OLPC para usuarios, docentes, voluntarios y administradores olpc-...@lists.laptop.org Cc: Gleducar gledu...@gleducar.org.ar http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/marketing/2011-May/003273.html On Fri, May 6, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Daniel Ajoy da.a...@gmail.com wrote: linux system por $25 http://www.raspberrypi.org/ -- Edward Mokurai (#40664;#38647;/#2343;#2352;#2381;#2350;#2350;#2375;#2328;#2358;#2348;#2381;#2342;#2327;#2352;#2381;#2332;/#1583;#1726;#1585;#1605;#1605;#1740;#1711;#1726;#1588;#1576;#1583;#1711;#1585; #1580;) Cherlin Silent Thunder is my name, and Children are my nation. The Cosmos is my dwelling place, the Truth my destination. http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Replacing_Textbooks ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
