[squeakland] [IAEP] Why is Scratch more popular than Etoys?

[karl ramberg]

On Sun, Sep 18, 2011 at 10:57 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr.
<jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
> About programming for the masses, I see two educational reasons to
> insist on that. One (rather weak) reason is to demystify something that
> is everywhere. People will be dealing with software all the time and if
> having done one or two toy applications as a child makes them see that
> it is not magic then that is nice.
>
> A much better reason is Papert's: so the children will have an object to
> think with. The idea is to learn to learn but we need a suitable way to
> talk about learning strategies. Normal school tends to encourage a very
> poor strategy: take a guess, see if the teacher confirms it is right and
> if not take another guess. Not only is the search time long and
> unbounded, you also need some external way of checking your results
> which is something you won't always have.
>
> Teaching programming is just a way to be able to teach debugging, or
> successive approximation. You don't throw away incorrect attempts but
> instead build on them. And you learn to figure out for yourself if they
> are correct or not, and how far and in what way they are incorrect so
> you know what to change.

With Etoy now we have few projects that challenges a notion and show
you a way to get there.
We have the project showing the most basic stuff.

I think we need more projects that features aspects of the system and
how to use them.

Of course Mr.Steve has made many nice videos :-)
http://mrstevesscience.blogspot.com/

Karl