So I think the original thread drifted a bit. I'm curious about what folks think of the research involved here. I read the paper.
A few things stuck out. The thing I'd mention is that it seemed to work (at least superficially) with getting 12 year olds to (begin to) tackle a programming language which by my own (prejudiced) standards is a rather difficult choice for *adults* who want to program casually. I guess I also identified with the whole set of things they identified as common among kids who learned to code in a quiet hole without any real support. They say that Java wasn't trying to convert the Lisp crowd, so much as the C++ crowd. Lisp, so far, seems a lot more learnable than C++ but that's beside my interest here. Since one of the things I think we ought to be arguing about in this context is "how do we scale things like Scratch or Etoys up to the sky and down to the metal?" I do think the study is relevant. It maybe helps explain how to deal with the trip to the metal end. Or maybe not. OTOH I didn't feel like there were enough numbers in there. It felt very very soft-science, and maybe there's no way around that. And maybe I have a prejudice about soft science. I got the general sense that the smell meant it was working, though, so I'm really interested in seeing what these folks do next. At the end of the day, what works, works, right? Does anyone here know these researchers? Any chance we might be able to pull them into the dialogue? At risk of wasting time on BS troll threads. I get the sense these are the kind of people I'd like to see posting here. Anyway they've got some *very* relevant experience now, and I think it would be cool to hear about what they're planning to do next. Just a thought. -- Casey Ransberger
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