Thanks everyone for help in prepping for my first lesson, which was
held yesterday. I think the first class went well, despite
significant setup glitches. We only got as far as the first section
of my lesson plan, covering simple shapes and colors.
Shoes feedback:
- I told the kids that they would be learning Ruby, which I use in my
work, and they seemed pretty excited that they were learning a "real"
programming language
- Kids loved the name -- laughter and joyous confusion when I was
explaining what it was
- Thanks everyone for the last minute Shoes history, they were really
interested in the computer history talk and were excited to hear about
the stuff created in their lifetime that they actually knew about and
used. Half the class was alive in 1998, and for them the Web, Google
and YouTube are contemporary with microwave ovens (e.g most people use
them). My timeline ended with:
•1993: World Wide Web created
•1995: Shockwave & Flash first released
•1998: Google website launched
•2004: FlickR website launched
•2005: YouTube website launched
•2007: Shoes released!
- There's a novice syntax error which will actually crash Shoes
Shoes.app do
fill blue
rect left => 10, top => 10, width => 50
end
- Errors for which the error messages were hard to figure out
Shoes. app (note: they are trained to put a space after the
period) also Shoes . app
misspelling of blue (bule) showed an error on the following line
- Previous noted install issue on Windows where shortcuts don't get
installed for all users
Lessons learned (which I had posted to the RailsBridge list, Chad is
another RailsBridge member who volunteered to help with the class):
- I need to work more on the setup, since I can't rely on the school
computers no matter how much time I spend setting them up (4 hours
yesterday). Next thing I'm going to try is to put Shoes and Notepad++
on a USB drive and see if they can just access the installed software
from there. There's all sorts of odd issues with the student accounts
not having correct permissions and some computers having special
cleanup software which wipes everything you just installed when the
computer restarts :) Chad suggested putting a whole Ubuntu edu distro
w/ Shoes on the USB drive or a CD, which would be cool, but I'm going
to start with just the apps and see if that works.
- the computer history presentation could be a full hour long class,
the kids really liked it and wanted to ask more questions & make
observations (I ended up spending 25 minutes on this, instead of my
planned 10 min)
- What I normally do is a coding demo with them following along and
typing with me. I wish I had done that. Instead, because of the set
up glitches, I let them follow the instructions while Chad and I tried
to debug various install issues... and the instructions weren't really
made for that. Besides the interactive Q&A is good for them. Also
would be good to accidentally (on purpose) create a syntax error and
have them see me debug it.
FYI: I'm publishing the lesson plans as part of a RailsBridge project (http://railsbridge.org
) which is just starting up -- if anyone is interested in
collaborating, let me know or just sign up for the RailsBridge google
group.
The worksheets are published here:
http://github.com/railsbridge/teachingkids/downloads
which Satoshi Asakawa translated to markdown
http://github.com/ashbb/teachingkids/tree/master/md/Ruby_Programming_and_Shoes.md
I like that the markdown file allows better collaboration (viewing
changes and revision history) and github allows easy forking /
merging, so I'll probably move to that.
Thanks everyone for your help! Shoes is wonderful and I am excited to
get further with the lessons and can't wait till the kids get deeper
into coding.
Sarah
http://www.ultrasaurus.com
