From: jweirich@... Date: 2001-10-20T22:31:22+09:00 Subject: [ruby-talk:22829] Re: Teaching children to program using Ruby >>>>> "Jimmy" == Jimmy Thrasher <> writes: Jimmy> I'm considering teaching a young person (13-year-old) how Jimmy> to program using Ruby. Has anybody tried to do this? Are Jimmy> there any resources? I remember when Python was new there Jimmy> were people discussing how they were teaching their Jimmy> children how to program, so if any of you have done that, Jimmy> it would be a great resource to me. >>>>> "David" == David Alan Black writes: David> Have a look at Pete McBreen's RubyConf presentation. He David> talked about that. Hmmm... I don't have the Web address David> handy, but Chad Fowler posted it here some time yesterday. David> Nor am I sure how much child- related material made it to David> the Web version, but have a look and see. During the discussion of Pete's talk at RubyConf, the idea of turtle graphics for Ruby came up. I played around with this idea During OOPLSA and came up with some initial code and managed to demo it during the Ruby Birds of a Feather talk. Essentially, it will allow you to do stuff like the following (in irb)... require 'turtleworld' turtle = world.new_turtle turtle.pendown 4.times { turtle.forward(100); turtle.right } The above code will draw a square box in a graphical window (currently a TK canvas object). Kids can learn about OO and programming as they try to teach the turtle to draw different kinds of patterns and geometrical shapes. This is similar to the curriculum used in elementary schools to teach kids about programming in LOGO. (My kids did the LOGO curriculum in elementary school, until the board decided that the computer classes should be used to teach kids more than how to draw pretty shapes ... sigh). I'll clean up the code and publish it this evening. -- -- Jim Weirich jweirich@one.net http://w3.one.net/~jweirich --------------------------------------------------------------------- "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)