[Edu-sig] ACM Urges Obama to Include CS as Core Component of Science, Math Education

[Daniel Ajoy]

On Thu, 25 Dec 2008 06:00:02 -0500, <edu-sig-request at python.org> wrote:

> From: "Edward Cherlin" 
> 
> 2008/12/23 michel paul :
>> http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/obama-education
>>
>> "Computing education benefits all students, not just those interested in
>> pursuing computer science or information technology careers," said Bobby
>> Schnabel, chair of ACM's Education Policy Committee (EPC).
> 
> Thanks. I'll invite them to join Earth Treasury's digital textbook
> project for the OLPC XO + Sugar. We have Smalltalk, Python, and FORTH
> standard on the XO, and we can add anything else of interest. Well,
> not Ada or C++, but those aren't of interest to third graders. 
> 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Creating_textbooks


I don't think FORTH comes with the XO by default. I've the Mexico and Uruguay images and I haven't seen it. What's the name of it's executable?

Smalltalk only comes if Etoys is installed.

What does come is another very nice language, in my opinion. It is
* typeless
* interpreted
* small
* manages memory automatically
* does conversions between numbers and strings automatically
* can connect to the internet
* can pipe in and out of commands and files.
* it has hashes, and arrays are just hashes of numbers.

the language is called awk, and the interpreter gawk

now that I think of it, there is another programming language that comes by default: javascript.


> APL is
> coming. Scheme is pretty easy. What else would you like?

UCBLogo is Scheme without parethesis (and with dynamic scope, instead of lexical scope)
http://wiki.laptop.org/images/e/e5/Ucblogo-4.xo

The problem is that is it not sugarized yet.


and the LogoFE library for Logo makes is very much like APL. LogoFE is already in Spanish the language spoken in Uruguay, Colombia and Perú, where the XO has had deployments.


Daniel