Hi

I just want to share some experiences we have with teaching programming
and how we could use the scripting area for this purpose.

Context:
	- I had one week to decide what to do 
	- I had no experience in Squeak but a lot in Smalltalk
	- My wife is the teacher and do not know anything about programming
	but she is a physic and math teacher
	- the children are from 11 to 15 in group of 6 to 15 and they were fed
	up to do somethign in Word ;)
	
What we are doing: 
	- I designed a Turtle class inspired from Pen.
	- I wrote a script in french (for those interested I can put the 
	first part on the web the code is still in english). I have three 		
	chapters with basic turtle, angles, iterations, and use of vairables. 
	
	Why did I made that?
	- I made some design decision that are REALLY important for us
		- the zero (direction) should be the mathematical one 
		and not the north, so 0 is the positive x axis 
		- I changed the coordinate so that 0 at 0 for a turtle
		is bottom left croner and top-left corner. 
		- turnLeft: and turnRight: or turn: with positive argument
		should turn in the mathematical sense -> not clockwise
		
	All these mathematical concepts are taught to children in France when 
	children have between 13 and 15.
	
	- I did not choose to use the scripting area because
		- I wanted that the children could if they want 
		write code in the browser at the end. 
		
		- I wanted to have the control of what I was doing.
		
		- I do not know how to restrict the actions proposed in the
		scripting area to create the interface 
		I wanted for my limited turtle
		
		- I have some problems with it. I was testing 
		and sometimes apparently the instance variabkewere not 
		udpated by the script. 
	
What are the results up to now after one lesson for the younger, 
	two lessons for the other.
	- Children react pretty well and the younger are really fast 
	to grab the concept to our surprise. We explianed that because
	the younger have to read the script and naturally they don't :)
	So may be we will teahc tehm without a script.
	

In the future we will continue to introduce slowly the concepts: 
	(- basic function of a turtle done) 
	- angles
	- iterations
	- use of local variables
	- (may be blocks as first stupid methods)
	- absolute position
	- storing scripts (may be in a browser)
	- Tests and recursion

We would like to use a Swiki were every child could share with the
other ones the scripts he like the most
	
	
Stef	

Stephane DUCASSE (ducasse at iam.unibe.ch) http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~ducasse/
"if you knew today was your last day on earth, what would you do 
different? ... especially if, by doing something different, today 
might not be your last day on earth" Calvin&Hobbes

University of Bern, Institut fuer informatik and Mathematik
IAM-SCG, 10 neubruckstrasse, CH-3012 Bern, Switzerland.