[Sugar-devel] What is your favorite application for use in CS classes?

[Edward Cherlin]

1) I am currently working on CS, math, and science lessons for primary
school classes based on Turtle Art in Sugar education software,
originally for the OLPC XO but now available for multiple versions of
Linux.

http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activities/Turtle_Art
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/File:Gravity.odt

Tile-based programs click together to create program trees independent
of any linear text-based programming languages, thus eliminating
syntax errors. In conventional programming, the user is two levels
(lexical analysis, parse) away from the parse tree that the compiler
uses for semantic transformations and code generation. A further
advantage is that tiles have different kinds of connectors, preventing
type mismatches between Booleans used in flow control, text or numeric
values, and program steps.

Tile-based programming is also available in Etoys (Smalltalk), Scratch
(Multimedia) and other software.

2) We are not yet ready to use the Parrot VM as a foundation for CS at
a higher level. At some point it will make it fairly easy to implement
a wide range of dynamic languages, by providing the foundations such
as on-the-fly garbage collection, concurrency and object structures.
This will allow language designers to work at a higher level. Current
trial versions of languages are available from
http://www.parrot.org/languages.

3) My principal interests in CS are in making clear how wide the range
of useful languages and models of computation is, what their
foundations are in mathematics, and how to turn complex mathematical
ideas into readily-applied language features, libraries, and the like
(where possible). I follow AI researcher Marvin Minsky.

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way."

Most programmers have almost no exposure to these concepts, and most
CS researchers restrict themselves to a very small range of models. I
have not yet had a chance to try out Oz and Mozart, which are designed
to expose multiple models of computation, so I can't say yet whether
they will become favorites. See Concepts, Techniques, and Models of
Computer Programming, by Peter Van Roy and Seif Haridi.

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 3:36 PM, Sebastian Dziallas<sebastian at when.com> wrote:
> No matter what it is, please tell us! Why? Because we in Fedora's
> Education SIG [1] are looking for ways to make your life easier.
>
> We are currently working on a development environment both for students
> and teachers, to give them an easy start into open source communities.
> The very first version has been announced and distributed for POSSE [2]
> and we're now looking for ways to improving it.
>
> So if you've any application you're excited about, please let us know!
>
> Thanks,
> --Sebastian
>
> [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Education_SIG
> [2] https://fedorahosted.org/education/
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>



-- 
Silent Thunder (默雷/धर्ममेघशब्दगर्ज/دھرممیگھشبدگر ج) is my name
And Children are my nation.
The Cosmos is my dwelling place, The Truth my destination.
http://earthtreasury.org/worknet (Edward Mokurai Cherlin)