[Edu-sig] Articles of possible interest

[Dorothea Salo]

Hi, Guido (and edu-sig),

	Thanks for being such a good sport!

>I had wanted the examples to be more realistic, but I don't really
>know any girls (or boys!) in the ages described in the article, and I
>still don't have the faintest idea what kind of games or other
>activities *would* appeal to them so I could make the examples.
>(Surely not Pokemon!)

	You'd be surprised. My coworker's daughter -- 9 or 10, I think --
got her picture in the newspaper last Halloween in some sort of Pokemon
getup. I myself am rather an anime fan (although Pokemon makes me gag).

  I remember what I liked myself around that age,
>but I was probably several standard deviations away from the norm, and
>too socially inept to know what the girls were interested in.

	Well, I don't deny that the Barbie girls exist (I started to
include a paragraph to that effect, but it got whiny, so I deleted it). I'm
just not sure they're CP4E's first target, and they're certainly not its
only target!

>I did realize before it went to press that girls of that age no longer
>play with Barbies, but I didn't know what to substitute, and neither
>did my fiancee.  I figured that 95% of the audience would be men like
>me who wouldn't notice the cultural discontinuity, so I decided to
>leave it in...

	Part of the problem. But I said that. :) You have more women in
your audience than you probably realize, and you'll have more (and more
vocal) women if you make them feel welcome.

>Coming around to your plea for more text processing: good point.  I
>still believe that many kids would find text processing boring (you
>must have a more than average interest in it given your interest in
>linguistics),

	Well, yes, I certainly do, in the same way that computer
programmers tend to have a more than average interest in mathematics. (I do
confess that I haven't darkened the door of a math classroom since the
calculus class I mentioned.)

	My point is more that kids might find text processing *immediately
useful* in a way that robots aren't. Moreover, text processing is probably
already a part of their lives in a way that robots aren't -- I think I
typed up my first paper at age 13, and I expect kids these days are doing
it younger. It seems a shame not to leverage some of that familiarity.
They've seen and used spellcheckers, why not have them program one?

	There is also the fascinating interaction between computer language
and natural language to explore. What are the "parts of speech" of Python?
"for" isn't really a preposition, is it? Then what is it? I think
verbally-oriented kids could really get into discussions like that -- and
learn about *both* computer language *and* natural language in the process.

 and to really show off the power of today's computers,
>graphics are in order.  Searching a million words in under a second
>isn't quite as impressive as displaying realistic full-screen 3-D
>animation at 30 frames per second, I think, and the latter appeals
>more to people who can't program at all, Internet search engines not
>withstanding.

	No argument. But again, there *really are* people who yawn at
pretty pictures who can be grabbed by an instant translator (especially if
it's any good, which most of them aren't).

	Playing with strings can actually be a lot of fun. The "aha moment"
that brought me to Python was learning about regular expressions. Most
programmers, I think, find regexes as boring and difficult as I find
computational math games. Me, I *love* constructing regexes, do it all the
time and have done really pretty amazing things with them -- and I think
there are LOTS of people who would catch onto them quickly and find them as
fascinating as I do.

>I also believe strongly that graphical user interfaces (if done well!)
>are better than text interfaces for most things, including debugging.

	Oh, I tend to believe that also (she said, typing busily on a
Macintosh). It's not like most people use emacs instead of Microsoft Word
(*spit*).

>Interestingly enough, I believe that programming itself,
>i.e. expressing the intended operation of a computer program, is best
>done through text.

	Well, because I'm so painfully verbal rather than visual, I sort of
like the draw-the-GUI-widget development aids. But in the main I agree,
insofar as I'm qualified to.

>I hope that you could see through my biased examples and found some
>information on where I think IDLE should go.  I'd love to discuss that
>here or in the idle-dev list.

	Yes, indeed I did. I shall have to start lurking on idle-dev.

	Thanks again for keeping your temper. I did try to stay out of
flame-mode, but I'm never quite sure I've managed it.

Dorothea

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dorothea Salo       <*>           |"He querido mas vivir en mi peque~a casa,
dorothea@terracom.net             |exenta, y se~ora, que no en sus ricos
http://www.terracom.net/~dorothea |palacios, sojuzgada y cativa."_Celestina_