On 9/25/06, Peter Chase <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Is that ALL you have been fighting about these many months? My > goodness. Well, thanks for filling me in. >
I thought you meant just in the last few days. No, that's not all we've been fighting about, plus Arthur and I agree sometimes e.g.: * Crunchy Frog is kwel * VPython is kwel * raw_input moving to sys isn't the end of the world (even for teachers) Where Arthur and I overlap is in not wanting lose the "hard fun" (Seymour Papert's term) and devolve to mere "fun" -- in the sense that we stop challenging students with the hard core stuff and just entertain them with fuzzy wuzzy mind-rotting stuff, e.g. mere eye candy, meaningless toys and geegaws that don't adequately prepare them for the hard fun of potential adulthood. We're both fans of stark and austere approaches, kind of like those old fashioned mathematicians and their nostalgic cries the good old days of "pencil and paper". Instead of pencil and paper, I point to the Python shell + text editor as a starting point. No need for drag and drop, ala Lego Mindstorms, by the time they're up to the Python level. As background to all this: Arthur honed in on Alan Kay and his Squeakland project as representative of the kind of geegawing and eye candy he thought'd lead to mind rot, and so Alan became a kind of metaphor for the antichrist around here. Then our Benevolent Dictator was invited by Mark Shuttleworth to attend a London summit with Alan, representatives from Scheme community, top educators in South Africa, including government ministry types. I was given our Python Nation's Minister of Education portfolio and sat at Guido's side (opposite Alan) as we hunkered down for two days of intensive brainstorming, the upshot of which is Project Kusasa, which plans the following pipeline for 8-18 year olds: Logo | Squeak | Python. As a result of this brainstorming, edu-sig heated up with a lot of recent cross-talk between Pythoneers and Smalltalkers (Squeak is written about Smalltalk) regarding what features of immersive environments might be moved to Python. This might include actual pieces of software engineering at the C level -- that was a thread Alan and Guido started at the summit itself. Again, Arthur, suspicious of Croquet and Squeakland (aka "Ninja Turtles") pushes back against any "dumbing down" of the potential Python curriculum. However, I don't see that as a problem, as the Shuttleworth Pipeline follows the grain of the maturation process in a natural way: motor skills & avatar control (Logo-like); immersive fantasy worlds and role playing (Squeak-like); under-the-hood investigations of what makes it all go (Python as your guide in the "tunnels under Disney World"). Of course by age 18, many are ready to go deeper, in which case we have many pathways to choose from. Python -> Java -> private sector cubicle, is one popular option. I also suggest Python -> C (study Python's core) -> C# -> IronPython (i.e. come back to Python but by way of immersion in the C family). Basically, the "basic motor skills" -> "immersion" -> "contributing to the guts" sequence gets repeated over and over at different levels in life. I doubt Arthur disagrees. There's also another theme woven in, which is that before my Minister of Education stint, I was already a top dog in what's called the Fuller School (e.g. bfi.org), a pirate ship captained by R. Buckminster Fuller (Applewhite as quartermaster). I bring that experience with me to edu-sig, e.g. http://tinyurl.com/lqbhc http://tinyurl.com/legbp Kirby _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
