-------- Original Message -------- Subject: website contact Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2009 14:07:00 -0500 (EST) From: Asaf Yatskan maya.yatskan@012.net.il To: squeakland staff webcontact@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
On Monday 02 Mar 2009 6:27:26 pm Rita Freudenberg wrote:
1. What do you think is the most suitable language for 9 years old boy (that is not an English speaker)?
Etoys is a good "programming" environment for this age group. I know quite a few non-English children who loved the ability to model real world stuff in Etoys. They tend to think of Etoys as a modeling or "play acting" environment rather than a 'programming' environment.
2. Do you think Etoys and Squeak can provide tools for young programmer in the future?
It definitely introduces programming concepts to children in a gentle, unpretentious way.
Subbu
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