[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Andre Roberge]

On 7/6/07, Michael Tobis <mtobis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sorry, but I don't think you've successfully motivated your students
> if that is all they can do in a month. Let me hazard a suggestion.
> Rather than being too mabitious you are not being ambitious enough.

For having exchanged a few emails with Andy over the years, I feel I
have to come to his defense and disagree with this statement.  (more
below)

>
> Scripting languages have batteries included. Doing the stuff you would
> have done with BASIC in 1980 is not necessary and not sufficient. I
> imagine few tenth graders can connect printing sentences backwards and
> such with anything they care about.
>

The following is a quote from an old message from Andy on this very list:
========
I've found RUR-PLE to be a very constructive way to approach programming. I
use it to teach the basics of looping and branching and defining
subroutines, and we do about 6 of Andre's exercises.  (We spend about 4 1/2
hours of class time on it before moving on to Python, using modified
versions of the LiveWires and a little bit from How To Think Like a Computer
Scientist.)
========
These are all modern resources targeted to kids.

----
As for Andy's original query....   I have no answer to provide.

André