[Edu-sig] re: Learning software for 10-13 year olds

[Arthur]

 >More to the point might be:

 >Debian Jr. Project
 >Debian for children from 1 to 99
 >http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-jr/

 >and

 >http://www.ofset.org/freeduc/

Guess I'm off on a consectutive post binge again.

but having touted Freeduc I thought I should explore it further.  And am 
excited by what I found and thought I might describe it further/better 
than previously.

Freeduc makes available an iso image which is a run from CD Linux system 
chock full of apps of potential interest to children and K-12 educators.

It is interntionized from the ground up.  One boots by selecting a 
language. End of configuration option issues.

It booted flawlessly on my Dell, welcoming me through my sound card, 
after having booted up a nice XServer. It starts Apache on boot and runs 
local help resources through it. My internet connection was found at 
boot, and I was browsing (with Galeon) not necessary aware wether I was 
local or on the Net.  In other words I had done exactly 0 configuration 
and was quite well in business.  A little remarkable, to me.

Think it to be a great resource for someone such as Guido's neighbor.

The latest image includes Python2.2.2. On the app side I see Sketch
http://sketch.sourceforge.net/ prominently in the default menu system.

don't see Idle, which is a shame.

Guess I will start some lobbying for idle, vpython, and eventually - 
when it is truly ready for prime time, PyGeo - those coinciding with my 
own particular interests.

The prime movers behind Freeduc are the developers of Dr.Genius, a 2d 
GUI based dynamic geoemtry construction kit. So I am dealing with folks 
quite knowledgeable about dynamic geoemtry software.  Hoping they will 
see something innovative about PyGeo, in ways that are complementary to 
their own work.

I have successfully redesigned PyGeo so that it works nicely from the 
interactive prompt - allowing geometric constructions to proceed 
interactively line by line. The main thing missing at this point being 
full users docs, and a good tutorial.  My first stab at a start to the 
tutorial ends of being a general introducation to Python as experienced 
from the interactive prompt. My tact will be very non-technical, but 
will try to introduce Python "experientially"  -  most particularly 
making users aware of the interactive help facilities (I am building 
__doc__ strings into the PyGeo source), and some basic introspection 
facilities. E.g. walking through a dir() call before and then after an 
import has been made - giving, I hope, an intutitve sense of namespaces 
and what is happening behind the scenes.  And then on to some specifics 
as to PyGeo.

Art