From: Laurent Julliard <laurent__no__@__spam__moldus.org>
Date: 2004-05-23T20:58:44+09:00
Subject: [Q] Ruby for educational purposes and localization

All,

I have been thinking for some time now about the right way to teach 
the basic of computer languages and programming to young children that 
are roughly 11/12 years old.

In my first experiments I found them extremelly good at picking the 
basic ideas of object oriented programming. Creating objects which 
answers messages is something they understand almost instantly.

After telling them about the first basic OOP conmcepts came the 
question of what environment to use to let them implement their first 
program. After some trial and errors sessions it looks like Ruby is 
easy enough to understand for them and they were able to implement a 
few things very quickly.

The problem is that for non english speaking children, all programming 
languages add the burden of learning the reserved keywords of the 
language (Class, method, for, each, while,etc...) which are all in 
English and not in their mother tongue.

So I started to think about a way by which one could define "synonyms" 
for all Ruby reserved keywords in another language (e.g in French 
"while" would be "tantque", "do" becomes "faire", etc...). All this 
should be done while preserving the ability to require any existing 
Ruby module written in plain english.

I would be happy to start a discussion on that topic and welcome any 
input on what the alternatives would be to do this?

Thanks!

Laurent

PS: I am now convinced that Ruby is ideal for teaching computer 
programming to children, the next step is to have something similar to 
the Squeak Environment (http://www.squeak.org).