Depends of the feeling you want to give them:

****** You can program machines to do what you say?

The example of Andreas Raab?
- give them a car that can follow a track under the car and then let then
paint a crazy-racetrack..
- different cars with different progammed tracking-systems?
- he you, which car should do the best on this track?

*********** Another feeling you can give them is using a computer as a tool
- in this area my favorite for youngsters is the animation-creation page of
Squeakland
- For older ones: Alice in Wonderland (the original)


************* A real programmers feeling:
- ask them to type a program exactly as you said (Supercallefragulous...)
- ask them to start the program (When I did type from Mark's book the little
5 line program that cuts out a piece of the screen and did turn-around it, I
was stuck by this feeling, while I take it for granted to open a 3D-tool and
change the place of the sun in that scene with a handle..)


**************** tackling common sense about clever machines?
- Another experience from the old days: when we demonstrated to parents and
teachers the use of the first homecomputers we asked them to write line by
line a basic-program.
(Yes, I did control that machine-feeling..)

Which program? No not hello world but that other one: What is the capital
city of... (yes the education area)

On of the parents brought in the program:
line 1: show question
line 2: get userinput
but before bringing in the third line where the answerhandling took place,
this parent started the program and said it worked, even without that third
line!!

The question was shown on the screen, 
the parent gave the correct answer,
and the machine said OK

Then I asked this parent to run the program again and give a wrong answer..
the machine said again OK... (because this Dutch machine said always OK when
the program-run was ended..)

When I showed this parent how you had to teach this machine to handle the
answer, 
the only reaction was disappointment and the question: 
"Where do you need amchines for if you have to teach them everything."

 (creating a morph with some program building block sentences you can take
out a cabinet and place on the canvas to compose a program? and the test
it?)

************************* Another favorite in the old days was the learning
machine:
Let the computer guess which animal you have in mind and when it is worng it
can learn to remember your animal for the next run.. (I still have a
1987-version in Basicode,  the Dutch Basic-esperanto from the 80s, running
under DOS (PC) and one day I will create a remake in squeak... ) 

************************* Good old Eliza (just for fun: feeding eliza-s
vocab is for older children)
************************* Game of life? older children

************************* Hangman in the versions where the child can bring
in the words (8-years old? allow wrong spelling?  








-----Original Message-----
From: cg at cdegroot.com [mailto:cg at cdegroot.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 1:01 AM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: Showing the essence of programming in 20 minutes to
schoolkids -


These seem to be more applicable to demoing Squeak. Whereas my intent
(well-understood by Andreas) is to use Squeak as a tool (if necessary, if
possible) to explain the essence of our work. Which basically boils down to
paid riddle/puzzle solving, not?

(whether it's riddle of puzzle solving depends on the quality of the specs
:-)).


Jerzy Karczmarczuk <karczma at info.unicaen.fr> said:
>1. Show that computers can hold THINGS which obey simple commands. Not only
>   textual: Bunny jump.  grasshopper move. etc., but also *gestual*. Show
>   that anybody, even a 5-year old Master can communicate with those
>   objects.
>
>2. Show that the objects are persistant, that the kids may do something
they
>   find nice, and 
>   a. they may send it to their pals. They may share it!
>   b. they may *keep* it for a few minutes, or a week; they may change it.
>
>3. Show that the environment is safe. That they can't really spoil
anything.
>   (Weeelll, we know they can, but keep that secret for a moment...)
>


-- 
Cees de Groot               http://www.cdegroot.com     <cg at cdegroot.com>
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