[Squeakland] looking for some advice on teaching Squeak to advancedhigh school kids

[Dreyfuss Pierre-André (EDU)]

Hi,

Squeak environment offers two ways :


_ Conventional text programming:
   Smalltalk,  close to pascal or c programming style but fully object oriented.

   Botinc  a simplified smalltalk for kids. see http://smallwiki.unibe.ch/botsinc/

- Tile  and script programming .
 E-toys (intended to kids but in fact a very powerful  system  with no high limit, what can not be dons with tiles can be done by scripts written with smalltalk).


    see http://www.squeakland.org/

         In french:

         http://community.ofset.org/index.php/EToys

 Kedama, an extensions of E-toys :  A massively-parallel tile-scriptable particle system.
  (Something like starlogo). Interesting for observing the behavior of large populations obeying at the same rules and emergence problems.

    see http://www.is.titech.ac.jp/~ohshima/squeak/kedama/

        In french:

        http://community.ofset.org/index.php/Kedama

Regards

-------- Message d'origine--------
De: squeakland-bounces at squeakland.org de la part de Oscar Nierstrasz
Date: lun. 26/11/2007 10:09
À: squeakland org mailing list
Objet : [Squeakland] looking for some advice on teaching Squeak to advancedhigh school kids
 

Hi Folks,

I teach at University level, not high school, and have no previous  
experience teaching high school kids.

At the end of January we will have a day and a half with a bunch of  
high school kids who are finalists in the Swiss Scientific Olympiads ( http://www.olympiads.ch/ 
  ) and have the opportunity to get them excited about computer  
science. We will have various sessions to show them different things.   
(I will not be the only one to offer something.  A colleague will be  
introducing the ones who have no background in programming to Scratch.)

I wanted to take the ones who have done some programming (i.e., those  
who have done the Swiss Olympiad in Informatics - http://www.soi.ch/ )  
and introduce them to Squeak.  For the Olympiad they have been working  
with languages like Pascal, C and C++.

I would like the session to be mainly hands-on, and get the kids to  
actually build something in teams of two with help from some monitors.

Does anyone have any experience like this?  Can you recommend some  
specific exercises that would be fun and would produce a real result  
in a few hours?  My concrete goal is to show them how different a  
dynamic language and environment like Squeak can be from the languages  
they are used to.

Any hints would be welcome.

- on
---
Prof. Dr. O. Nierstrasz    -- Oscar.Nierstrasz at iam.unibe.ch
Software Composition Group -- http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg
University of Berne        -- Tel/Fax +41 31 631.4618/3355
vcard:  http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~oscar/oscarNierstrasz.vcf



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