[Squeakland] [Fwd: website contact]

[Rita Freudenberg]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	website contact
Date: 	Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:07:00 -0500 (EST)
From: 	Asaf Yatskan <maya.yatskan at 012.net.il>
To: 	squeakland staff <webcontact at squeakland.org>



Dear Sir,
My name is Asaf.
I discovered Squeak and Etoys while helping my son creating programs on the wonderful Scratch programming language.
We are creating games on Scratch for about 2 years and it is fun both for me and for him 
Recently He asked me to learn him a more "grown up" programming language.
Since he is almost 9 years old, I have several doubts regarding the programming language that suits for him. I can easily teach him the popular languages such as C++ and Java or even C or I can teach him Etoys and then Squeak which seems to be much more educational 
I have to admit that squeak is new to me too but from a brief review of the language it seems to be a true object oriented language that I hope lets the programmer enjoy it.
Recently I discovered another interesting project which is called Alice; although Alice presents a fascinating way of programming in 3D I am not sure it is the right project to begin programming.
After this long introduction I wonder if you can help with some of my doubts and question:
1.	What do you think is the most suitable language for 9 years old boy (that is not an English speaker)?
2.	Do you think Etoys and Squeak can provide tools for young programmer in the future?  
3.	I found a nice implementation of Alice in Squeak which is called Alice in Squeakland 
the implementation was done by Jeff Pierce although it was implemented in Squeak ver. 2.0 I could run on downloadable Squeak ver.  3.10
Are you familiar with Alice implementation on Squeak. Is the squeak still supporting it?
Thank you for your time and help
Asaf



-- 
Rita Freudenberg
FIN-ISG
Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/isg/rita.html