This was a project to teach OOP to K-12 kids in America. It's better than teaching coding as it teaches encapsulation and structure (which most modern programming languages use), and does it covertly by animating graphics. has accompanying teaching materials as well (always a bonus).
The problem these days tends to be two-fold. First of all, there are the OOPS design methodology that most programs operate under. Sceond, most programs operate in a windows environment (X, Apple or Microsoft) which means that they tend to be event-triggered loop (at least if you want to start doing anything interesting). So whereas I could teach people to program their own game very easily on an old Apple II, you now have to create the superstructure supporting the program before you actually get to the program doing something, even something as simple as "Hello World." And then, because of the OOPS abstraction, it tends to miss all the finicky (and important) details anyway. Alice handles both these tasks implicitly.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-08-25 03:26 pm (UTC)This was a project to teach OOP to K-12 kids in America. It's better than teaching coding as it teaches encapsulation and structure (which most modern programming languages use), and does it covertly by animating graphics. has accompanying teaching materials as well (always a bonus).
The problem these days tends to be two-fold. First of all, there are the OOPS design methodology that most programs operate under. Sceond, most programs operate in a windows environment (X, Apple or Microsoft) which means that they tend to be event-triggered loop (at least if you want to start doing anything interesting). So whereas I could teach people to program their own game very easily on an old Apple II, you now have to create the superstructure supporting the program before you actually get to the program doing something, even something as simple as "Hello World." And then, because of the OOPS abstraction, it tends to miss all the finicky (and important) details anyway. Alice handles both these tasks implicitly.