[Watford] Something else discussed last night

[Jim Ford]

On 07/02/14 20:19, Peter Grant wrote:
> Programing mentality can be taught without programming languages being
> needed.
> Having seen Scratch taught in a school, I think it's well worth doing to
> the right age as it help convey the prinples of programming without
> requiring that the pupils don't accidentally use a colon instead of a
> semi colon.

I'm surprised that it has been taught in a school! My experience of 
working at a secondary school (as a science technician), is that 
anything that wasn't in the curriculum was totally ignored. I tried to 
interest a couple of science teachers in 'Squeak', suggesting that some 
physics laws could be modeled using the language, but only drew blank 
looks. This was at a 'good' independent school.

Powerful though the underlying Smalltalk language is, I feel that 
students used to sophisticated computer games aren't going to be 
inspired by putting a lot of work into crudely moving a simple avatar 
around a Squeak or Scratch 'playground'.

Jim