[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Sun, 08 Jul 2007 10:29:24 CDT, "Atul Varma" writes:
>Has anyone ever explored the idea of using a collaborative virtual
>community for teaching programming?  I'm thinking about something
>along the lines of Amy Bruckman's MOOSE Crossing:
>
>  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/moose-crossing/
>  http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~asb/thesis/
>
>As Laura was saying, having the students create something that's
>meaningful to them and their peers can be enormously motivating.  One
>of the advantages of any virtual community that supports third-party
>coding, from World of Warcraft to Second Life to text-based MOOs, is
>that they provide an excellent social context for computer
>programming.

<snip>

I haven't taught python this way.  But I have taught a whole lot of
people how to program in LPC that was.  see: 
http://www.genesismud.org/students/index

Most of the people at Open End (our company, whom Atul has visited)
all come from this background.  Genesis is still thriving, if nowhere
near as popular as it was in its hayday, when people queued to get on.
We often talk about writing a python version.  But there are never
enough hours in the day.  However, using pypy to make an LPC
front end becomes a more attractive proposition all the time.  Should
we ever get around to doing that, we can move to teaching people
python, which would be a lot of fun.

Laura (Hazelnut on Genesis, who is rarely seen there these days).