Wow, marvellous and thorough feedback, I count myself a very lucky
man today. Well done, Sarah, this is tremendous.
On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 06:09:04AM -0700, Sarah Allen wrote:
> - There's a novice syntax error which will actually crash Shoes
> Shoes.app do
> fill blue
> rect left => 10, top => 10, width => 50
> end
Mmmm, yes. I have consider doing some preprocessing to scan for
problems like this, in order to provide very specific messages.
("Please use a colon before each of the options on line 3.
Change `left => 10` to `:left => 10`.")
> - 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
I agree, the use of the period to join things is troubling to young
kids for are used to it as closing punctuation (also needing to
capitalize certain words and remembering to put commas between
words...
What we should do is make a list of minor errors that children make
and then decide upon what is the clearest way of phrasing how to
correct the problem, then use that as our guide for improving the
error console.
> 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.
One thing you may try is running the installer with some switches:
shoes2.exe /S /D=F:\Shoes
Will silently install Shoes to F:\Shoes. Maybe I could put in some
options to skip adding shortcuts, in the case that you're setting
up a flash drive.
Would it help if I packaged a version of Shoes which was just in a
zip file?
> - 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...
You might try getting some other older kids to come help do the
debugging while you teach. The best ratio is something like one
helper for every five kids. Then you go through the lesson in
advance with your helpers and not only do they become familiar
with your lesson, but they are really helpful for debugging. (Often
going through the lesson is just a matter of sending an email just
listing all the examples.)
> FYI: I'm publishing the lesson plans as part of a RailsBridge
> project (http://railsbridge.org)
Wild, so is the ultimate goal to teach Rails to the kids?
Well, again, brilliant work, Sarah!
_why
