[OT] - Are computers in education better now than 20 years ago?

[Michael L Torrie]

On Mon, 2007-02-12 at 12:58 -0700, Levi Pearson wrote:
> > I should really look more into Squeak to see if it makes doing this easy or not.
> >
> > Dan
> 
> Squeak is very cool, but not as a system for making programs that look
> like a typical user would expect a program to look like.  
 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Why is this a problem?  None of the programs I every wrote when I was in
elementary school looked like anything commercial.  That simply wasn't
the point.  The idea is to educate a student on how a computer works and
how to write programs.


> I do think
> it's a great educational computer platform, since it's got stuff in it
> that looks fun to kids and makes it relatively easy to figure out how
> to do similar things.  The main trouble is that there's a LOT of stuff
> in Squeak, and it's not all terribly well documented.  It's a very
> powerful system, though, and anyone curious about what it can do
> should watch one of the many Alan Kay presentations on YouTube, in
> which he uses Squeak as his slideshow mechanism and demos all sorts of
> nifty stuff.