Alan Kay wrote:
> It's good to remember that a "productivity tool" and a "learning 
> environment" are not coextensive (they overlap, but there are also big 
> differences in the final goals, the materials that are supplied, and 
> what kinds of work and play are being motivated).
> 

That certainly is true. But after extensively playing around with EToys 
I have descided to use Stephane's approach. The main reason is that in 
my eyes schools do not have the task to teach how do "programming", to 
get things animated on the screen --- it's real educational value is too 
limited. I want more!

Programming means having tools at hand to do modelling and 
_abstraction._ So I need the concept of classes, and even more 
fundamental: I need the concept to express actions as written text.

I recently started a course with 7th-graders (age about 13 years) with 
Stephane's book --- they love it. They all know about syntactic issues 
from maths --- in a way they know that an expression in a formal 
language must be well formed. So they easyly grasp the fact such as 
"there must be a colon after the message-name if an argument follows". 
Of cause they don't really read the error-messages, they just see "there 
must be some error" and they remember the simple rules. Don't 
underestimate Smalltalk --- it's easy understandable because it has a 
simple and straight-forward design.  Even mor to the point: I want 
programming in Smalltalk with Squeak as a programming environment --- I 
do not want programming in Squeak with Smalltalk as a nescessary evil 
which should be hidden as much as possible.

I have the feeling that programming in EToys would deprive my pupils 
from an easy "upgrade-path" to higher levels of abstraction and 
problem-solving. But of cause others may have other impressions, 
specially for pupils in other ages.

I would like very much to stay in contact with the people here who are 
using Stephane's approach.  We should continue to adapt the material to 
different pedagogical uses ...

Class is about to start ...

kf