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The full source code should ring alarm bells, too. It runs on their phones, in their vans. You don't have access to the hardware to verify it's running the source code they provided (and only the source code they provided). You don't have access to their compilers to verify it's not inserting other code.

Thnx for this: I liked the symmetry tutorial also - I immediately saw how I could also get students to construct simple molecues with straws and Blu-Tack, work out the axes of rotation and then check their answer on http://symmetry.otterbein.edu/ ... I had seen the Jmol site before but had forgotten about it - thx for the reminder.

Is Jmol going to teach them the difference between trans- and cis-, or dextro- and levo-?

Well, if you display a pair of molecules, one cis-, one trans- then maybe it could help :)

More interesting than Jmol itself are the many websites that use it as a teaching tool :

http://wiki.jmol.org/index.php/Websites_Using_Jmol

I particularly like this symmetry tutorial which is a bit advanced for high school, maybe.

The Heathkit Hero 2000 cost as much as a Yugo, but available with an optional arm and wireless terminal, it got a lot of students into robots. I remember writing a simple wall-following algorithm that ran on real hardware -- a lot more complexity than with Karel The Robot.

I was wondering if "UNIX" was still a trademark. In all the days I've been around computers I've heard them described as PC, Mac or unix system. PC has always been Wintel or compatible. Unix systems could mean Irix, Linux, *BSD, Solaris but mainly mean your going to be using "ls" instead of "dir" to do your dirty work. This article mentions a few ways a trademark can be lost and lists some nice examples.

• if buyers understand that the mark refers only to the type of goods sold, and not to its source, then it makes no difference what efforts the owner used, because the mark has become generic.
• if consumers use that company's mark to identify a certain product type, because the mark is shorter and easier to pronounce than the product's generic name
• when a particular brand achieves such a high market share that the brand becomes the category.

I think that most computer people would agree that unix is pretty generic by now. I don't know if this is directly related to the lawsuit or not. What do you think?

As for the 26 million year period itself, Scientific American offers some information.

intersting stuff!

Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos

http://www.mtsu.edu/~untch/karel/
http://ocweb.otterbein.edu /csc/cs115/web/karel/karel.htm

Karel is programmed in Pascal, which in turn is an API done in C. So a good way to proceed is have them master Karel, then program in Pascal, then C, then C++, Perl, Java, etc. My father once tried to teach me ALGOL and COBOL but being mainframe languages they were not very accessible. You can do a lot with just Pascal, however, and anyway the APCS test in highschool I took was in Pascal. After that, they'll either get into by themselves or just kinda lose interest in programming (like I did).