So per this post to Math Forum I'm taking pretty seriously this feedback from New Zealand, Nat Torkington reporting (during a keynote), regarding what works and what doesn't in CP4E and/or P4E pedagogy. http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=6312197&tstart=0 Discoveries: robots are lame, Logo blows, scratch.mit.edu followed by process.org makes a good pipeline. Of course some kids love robots, likewise turtles, so none of this makes sense without a goal up front, which in Nat's case was "training future hackers". Why I take Nat this seriously is it's hard to imagine a more personable geek with better people skills, what it takes to be an O'Reilly conference chair I'd imagine. So I can factor out a lot of the ego I'd expect from more biased and/or blinded individual. In the end, I sensed a willingness to make peace with robotics, provided the stuff works better, isn't crap. His argument was they'll pour on the hours, delaying gratification in ways only kids can, only to have the assembly not work as advertised, through for no apparent fault in construction i.e. they did all the steps, and still a no go. Too complicated, gets ugly. Per my Chicago talk (showmedo etc.), I'm not working with the same demographic in terms of age (could be New Zelanders -- as when working with Bernie **), am more focused on an older set, with stronger math skills thanks to earlier teachers. Why he didn't like Logo is it demands too much "degree-angle" thinking, all those 30-60-90 conventions, which eight year olds maybe don't have, thanks to withholding such material until much later (when learning to read a clock is when it should start, in conjunction with discussions about the Earth's spinning, i.e. 1st & 2nd grades, 24 hour dial clocks good to have handy). By the time students get to Python, I think we can assume "clock arithmetic" (another name for modulo arithmetic) and at least an inkling of what's in the math module, if not cmath (come later, as we navigate through NQRC). My only competition, at this level, are calculators on the low end, Mathematica / MathCad on the high end (Matlab isn't competition, given how Python and Matlab inter-operate already). sociality.tv might be going with ML (?), plus Ruby is strong with some of my Saturday Academy geeks, but I'm not too worried about the fate of our snake, even though Nat poked fun at its cryptic error messages (again, Guido never claimed 8 year olds were his target audience when inventing this creature). Per a conversation with Steve Holden, I go "everything is a snake in Python" in my intro, because I use "snake" to mean "generic object" -- because of all the __ribs__ (special names). Per rms, hackers like these kinds of jokes, even if they're not recursive in nature (not saying this one isn't -- kinda like the joke in 'Cars' (everything is a car in 'Cars', even the bugs)). Kirby ** Bernie Gunn, geochemist par excelance: http://worldgame.blogspot.com/2004/12/view-from-middle-earth.html