Good points, Michael.  It's necessary in developing such a course to decide
first whether students are to be taught how to *do* something or how to
*view* something.

Gary


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Grant" <mwgrant2001 at yahoo.com>
To: "The general-purpose Squeak developers list"
<squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 8:16 AM
Subject: Re: Teach non CS major introductory course using Squeak


Many years ago I took an elective in introductory
descriptive linguistics. It was very interesting
because we looked at a number very different languages
which underscored, for lack of better words, the
different avenues taken to the same
issue--communication. We did not learn a language.

If I were teaching a computer science course to
nonmajors I would undertake a survey much broader than
just programming. There are gazillion interesting
lectures to be made on the technology behind the
programming, applications, etc. and in each some
substantive about computer science can be said--in
other words a course on 'how did they do that?' If the
true focus of the course is programming for nonmajors
I would title the course as such.

As for the language of choice in the case of the
latter tyoe of course...I don't know if I would pick
smalltalk. In my experience there is more to the world
than objects (heresy). And there probably are too many
extraneous features. Each instructor really has to
think long and hard about what he or she want to
accomplish given the student at hand.

Got to go to work...

Regards,
Michael Grant







--- Ralph Boland <ralphpboland at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Many non computer science students often do an
> introductory course in computer science.
> They usually learn to program in a language such as



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