On Oct 15, 2004, at 5:56 PM, Jan Erik Mostr�m wrote:
On 2004-10-15 21:31, Larry Latour <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Incidently, am I wrong or didn't the whole OOP thing come out of the Smalltalk environment, originally CONCEIVED for K-12 programming (and continued nicely in Kay's Squeek environment).
Hmmm, I'm not sure but I think Simula was the first OO language (1964) while
Smalltalk arrived in 1969. I don't know enough about any of the languages or
the history to say anything about the design paradigms used at that time.
Simula was the first OO language, but Alan Kay invented the term when he was doing Smalltalk, so Simula is first retroactively. (http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html)
But I don't think you can say that because OO came from education (I don't
know if this is the case) that programming should be taught for programmings
own sake (to these young kids). There has to be a reason for teaching
programming! So what would this reason be? Problem solving? Math? Biology?
etc?
Yes, Alan was trying to develop a system for kids to use in learning, like Seymour Papert's goals for Logo.
Any of these reason would be OK with me and I've seen several successful
projects where programming is used to enhance learning of some subject, the
first that comes to my mind are Agentsheets and Boxer. But I don't believe
this is the general case (no data to back this up, just personal experience
from looking at the people around me), instead I think that programming is
taught in isolation. And if this is the case then I think that the time and
effort spent on programming could have used in a better way.
I completely agree. Below is the start of the preface from "Introduction to Computing and Programming in Python: A Multimedia Approach" (the book resulting from the "media computation approach" that we've been working on -- http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/mediaComp-plan).
One of the clearest lessons from the research on computing education is that
one doesn't just "learn to program." One learns to program something [5, 20],
and the motivation to do that something can make the difference between learning
to program or not [7]. People want to communicate. We are social creatures,
and the desire to communicate is one of our primal motivations. Increasingly, the
computer is used as a tool for communication, even more than a tool for calculation.
Virtually all published text, images, sounds, music, and movies today are prepared
using computing technology.
This book is about teaching people to program in order to communicate.
Mark
__________ Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing/GVU Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 Collaborative Software Lab, http://coweb.cc.gatech.edu/csl http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~mark.guzdial/
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