[Watford] Something else discussed last night

[Peter Grant]

This was in an independent school - which set it's own curriculum. And I'd
mention the teaching of Sanskrit. From the start of primary school.
Peter

"When you have a Swiss Army knife of a mind, everything looks like it
should be dismantled." Danny O'Brien/Merlin Mann


On 7 February 2014 21:23, Jim Ford <jaford at watford53.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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