>
>Mitch writes "Several researchers (Pea et al. (1987), Bonar and Soloway
>(1985)) note that novice programmers (using traditional sequential
>languages) often assume parallelism where none exists." I have noticed this
>as well - especially in the context of object-oriented programming. Novices
>assume that each object is active and working independent of the others.

I don't know which Pea reference that is, but Jeffrey Bonar's work 
was on how students got natural and artificial languages confused -- 
making assumptions of natural language in artifical language.  Brad 
Myers was working on this problem at CMU the last few years, but from 
the opposite angle: He asked people to describe how a video game 
should work, then he tried to create a language and interface that 
would work with the "natural" input.

Some of the "parallelism" in at least Bonar's and Myers' work is 
basically enumeration of a set.  "Do this action to everything that 
looks like that."  It's clearly parallelizable, but it's not clear 
that the speaker really meant that it had to be done in parallel.
>
>
>We probably can assume that a fair number of high school students can
>program StarLogo. A Google search 'starlogo "high school"' yields almost 400
>hits; 'starlogo school' yields almost 1500. StarLogo once only ran on a
>million dollar Connection Machine so student access was probably limited.

I'll bet that "java school" yields gobs, too, but I'll also bet that 
most of those students don't really know Java :-).  In our studies 
(most recent this summer, in US, UK, and Poland, in four 
institutions) showed that CS1/2 students really don't know much 
Java/C++/Scheme/WhateverThey'reLearning even after the second year. 
We asked students to input equations (no parens, in either infix or 
postfix notation) from a file and print the result, on-line, in 90 
minutes.  Average score was about 25%.

But I will agree that the odds are much better for the StarLogo 
students than the Java students.  I'm convinced that the answer to 
programming learning is engagement -- if there's something worth 
doing, students will learn all kinds of hard things in order to do 
it.  StarLogo feels much more engaging to me than Java...but Squeak 
even more so :-)

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
Associate Professor - Learning Sciences & Technologies.
Collaborative Software Lab - http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl/
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html