Slashdot Mirror

If you are ready to have the students move on from making simple animations in Scratch perhaps to making games in 2D and 3D you may want to check out AgentCubes http://www.agentsheets.com/agentcubes/ Like BYOB, you can make your own methods, use recursion, etc.

ps: what kind of class was this? Is this an after school program? Were the students self selected?

In Conversational Programming your program is executed all the time and annotated. The Bret Victor approach does not scale well in comparison because it tries to compute everything. That works fine for a toy example such as a simple drawing but what if your application has many objects interacting with the user or interacting with each other? Long answer in the paper but the short one is that you need to be able to focus on bits of code relevant to the users as suggested by the user through the selection of objects:

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~ralex/papers/PDF/Conversational-Programming%20VL-hcc2011.pdf http://www.agentsheets.com/Documentation/windows/Reference/conversational_programming.html

Here: http://www.agentsheets.com/index.html
That is a site dedicated to programming for kids, little kids even.

What is it?

is a unique software authoring environment where users of all ages can build games, interactive demonstrations, modifiable simulations, and more! Discover a new relationship to technology as you quickly

AgentSheets with Ristretto® - Define agent behaviors with Visual AgenTalk® - Amazing new Conversational Programming technology (patent-pending)...

It is amazing what government funding can do for the bottom line. I love this page Why Us It

Free tools are not always free solutions
Yes, there are free tools. But just how well do they really work and how sustainable are they? Do they include a curriculum that you can use? Can you really make sophisticated games with them? Can the tool be used for more than just games. For instance, can it be used to make powerful scientific simulations including visualizations? Do you want to be just a graduate research experiment? AgentSheets technology is studied and proven. It comes with a comprehensive curriculum that is ready to be put in place and will grow with your needs.

If you really want the kids to create an actual game and not just a couple of character moving around on the screen making speech bubble try http://www.agentsheets.com/ Does it work? Look here: http://scalablegamedesign.cs.colorado.edu/gamewiki/images/b/b2/Scalable_Game_Design_summary.pdf

One way of using technology effectively is to enable role play in the classroom. Collective Simulations combine social learning pedagogical models with distributed simulation technical frameworks. We have a human physiology simulation called Mr. Vetro. At the beginning of the class organs, simulated by PDAs, are handed out to the students. They have to collaborate in real time to keep Mr. Vetro alive. Nobody is falling asleep in these classes. Things can get very hectic in the classroom with heart and lung team nearly shouting at each other at times. However, this is not just about fun and engagement. Early evidence of our research indicates that the students better retain information and gain a deeper understanding of the interactions between the systems. Simple but working demo: http://www.agentsheets.com/research/c5/documents/i nteractive%20flier/c5-flier.html

Not only Alice, but AgentSheets as well, which also features a visual programming approach.

    http://www.agentsheets.com/

Disclaimer: In 2004-6 I worked as a 'Teaching Fellow' as part of an NSF funded grant providing computer science resources in local high schools. [ http://triplets.cs.memphis.edu/ ] As part of that work we introduced AgentSheets into several classrooms.

My biggest gripe with LISP is that there are so many fragmented implementations that if you're looking for an app that does something cool (Like dynamic web page generation) it typically won't be in the variant of Lisp that you're currently using.

While this does happen in areas which are not treated by the Common Lisp standard (notably network programming and concurrency), it really isn't the problem you make it out to be.

Here's just a handful of code libraries and frameworks for Common Lisp and the implementations they support:

• Araneida, an extensible web server and webapp framework: SBCL, CMUCL, OpenMCL, ABCL, CLISP, AllegroCL, LispWorks
• UnCommonWeb, a continuations-based web application framework: OpenMCL, CMUCL, SBCL, CLISP, AllegroCL
• CL-SQL, a powerful database library: AllegroCL, LispWorks, SBCL, CMUCL, OpenMCL
• McCLIM, a free implementation of the CLIM user interface library: AllegroCL, CMUCL, SBCL, OpenMCL, LispWorks, CLISP
• Cells-GTK, a GTK library built on top of Cells, for declarative UI development (a very powerful approach): AllegroCL, LispWorks, CMUCL, CLISP
• CL-PPCRE, a fast Perl-compatible regular expression library (which is faster than Perl's regexp engine, incidentally): AllegroCL, CLISP, CMUCL, Corman Lisp, ECL, MCL, OpenMCL, SBCL, SCL, LispWorks, Genera
• XMLisp, a very interesting intersection of XML and CLOS objects: MCL, LispWorks, OpenMCL, SBCL, CLISP
• ACL-COMPAT , a library with socket programming support (et. al.): CLISP, CMUCL, Corman Lisp, LispWorks, MCL, OpenMCL, SBCL, SCL

Another entry into programming is creating web pages, by tweaking them with JavaScript, and eventually CGI scripts. Really anything that allows tweaking is good, such as tweaking Mozilla or the computer desktop. Programming is about tweaking the world.

Once they feel ready to transition to a full programming language (Java, C++, etc.), there are ways to ramp up to that too. JavaScript is a great way to learn object-oriented concepts. Learning game programming really motivates kids and they learn about 3D graphics too (Nehe and GameTutorials). For building real desktop applications, NetBeans and the free JBuilder edition let you visually design java user interfaces, but something like Thinlets simplifies java development greatly (and introduces you to XML, see also other XUL-based development tools). Of course there are thousands of resources out there for learning java, see Sun's New to Java center.

Lastly, I think kids should keep a blog or a journal somewhere. If you have webspace, set them up a MovableType blog and let them tweak everything they want (adding commenting, shoutboxes, javascript goodies, etc.).

The idea of simplified programming makes me thing of Agentsheets. Does anyone know if this is the sort of thing he's working on?

Alice)
Essentially a 3D version of Logo. Users program 3D worlds and have characters which interact. Very cool (and no cost). The underlying language is Python.

Agentsheets
Stagecast
Both very good environments which allow children to build simulations of anything which interests them. They both use visual languages to reduce the need for keyboards.

ToonTalk
Users program robots to perform tasks. All done using programming by demonstration.

Lego Mindstorms
Yeah, don't need to write anything here. It's wicked.

Alternatively, you can wait until I develop my environment, but don't held your breath...:)