To the point on the percentage of students who would want to pursue computer science as a career - yes this will be a relatively small percentage. So we should keep programming subjects optional. I think in the earlier classes doing creative stuff with a computer like drawing or painting as well as using the computer as a information tool should be demonstrated.
To the point on programming languages - I tend to agree with Ashik - programming should be optional and taught to the students who are interested in it. The main objection I have with BASIC is that it tends to encourage poor programming practices IMO. But BASIC and LOGO are not the only options a lot of kid focussed programming languages have emerged - ( http://www.linux.com/feature/155203)I think I put a link to a visual programming language called scratch on the wiki home page - it lets kids create animations and games and other fun stuff and share it with each other (http://info.scratch.mit.edu/About_Scratch). There is a Debian version of it here - http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Linux_installer. Scratch is developed by MIT. Check out this guys review - http://www.openscience.org/blog/?p=211 I second Alice (http://www.alice.org/index.php) as an option - it has Linux option and is AFAICT from the license ( http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=license) - free. Alice is developed by Carnegie Mellon University Python - is certainly something that should be introduced at a later stage, but that being said I think it should be OK for STD 8 and up for geek students :-) By this time the interested ones would already be obvious from the inordinate time they spend in front of the computer ;-) Another option to Python is Ruby - which has a beginner friendly bundle called Shoes ( http://shoooes.net/) that you can use. - Nikhil PS - Updated the Wiki with these links and created a page called programming language discussions - please put all the various options with a link to download them on the page so we can download and try them out.... . On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 7:25 PM, Anoop Jacob Thomas <anoo...@gmail.com>wrote: > It is not blind hatred, infact I use ubuntu on my desktop. > > My point is if we tell a small kid that Ubuntu is an operating system and > later tell that it is a distro of GNU/Linux he will get confused. Well few > will understand, but not many. So better would be more about GNU/Linux, and > tell Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, i...@school and all are distros. Or so called > custom packages of GNU/Linux. > > So we can teach them about OS and tell that windows, GNU/Linux, Solaris are > examples of it. > > We have to teach them everything rather than telling about free software > alone. > > quote "It should be designed to be applicable across distros." If it has to > be designed to be applicable across all distros then the name should also be > generic. > > -- > Anoop Jacob Thomas > Lecturer, > SCT College Engineering. > http://anoop.caremedia.org > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ "Freedom is the only law". "Freedom Unplugged" http://www.ilug-tvm.org You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ilug-tvm" group. To post to this group, send email to ilug-tvm@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to ilug-tvm-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For details visit the website: www.ilug-tvm.org or the google group page: http://groups.google.com/group/ilug-tvm?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
