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Software Suggestions for Elementary School Workstations?
krog asks: "I've recently signed a contract with a local middle school to replace their aged Apple /// cluster with a roomful of IBM Aptivas running Linux 7.3. Now surely I will be installing such ease-of-use tools as KDE3, Gnome, and screen, but I am looking for suggestions of other software to install. Anyone know of any good text editors/BASIC interpreters/shells/etc suitable for eight-year-old children?"
Don't install BASIC on those computers. God, why repeat the mistakes of the past?
Put something that won't damage them for life. Better than BASIC are:
-Logo
-Python
-one of those programmable robot fighting games where you write programs to control fighting robots.
-Even LISP would be better than BASIC
-Pascal
Get your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape
Obviously you have never tried teaching children anything. Your choices are way off.
vi - With their small hands and weak retention, 8 year olds will never be able to master the keyboard spans that Emacs requires, nor memorize the lists of arcane commands.
vi is a toy editor. It's cute, and handy for tight memory situations, but should be avoided by those wishing to get real work done. Emacs is much more feature-rich and robust, and is an industry standard. Its menus make those difficult-to-reach key commands unnecessary.
Languages - You aren't seriously suggesting that the upcoming generation should use an interpreted language, are you? If so, say hello to 20 more years of code bloat. I think C (and definitely not the horror that is C++) would be the ideal astere first language for anyone, especially a young, impressionable mind.
On the contrary, interpreted languages are a great way to learn programming without the complexity of Makefiles, command lines, objects, and debugging. I'd recommend the Mono project, which is a Linux port of Microsoft's C# language, as a good introduction to interpreted programming.
Mathematica - There is no more suitable program for 8 year old math than mathematica. I mean, you installed Linux where they used to have Apple ]['s, right? So it sounds like you want to give them the big iron (heh, not THAT big iron). So don't try to give them "Blue Teaches Addition" or anything lame like that--go for the gusto and install the full professional version of Mathematica.
Mathematica might help in college, but what about after graduation? Nobody in the Real World uses Mathematica. MatLab is the only sane choice here.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
... if you don't have a plan for the software in place already? Why'd they select your bid? What benefit to the children would replacing the systems possibly have?
I'm sorry, but classroom time, especially for third graders, is way too valuable to be wasted on computers. You're not going to find educational software on Linux that in any way replicates the software that they were using on their Apples, no teacher is going to want to spend class time teaching eight year olds about the tedious minutiae of futzing with shells and program invocation and KDE's ass-backwards menuing systems and the zillion other counter-intuitive tasks that dealing with computers entails -- to say nothing of learning it all themselves.
These systems will be gathering dust before the school year's out, in all likelihood. Now, that's not your fault, really, still less Linux's, but the situation is basically pointless. You might as well leave them in console for all the good that they'll do.
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.