internal worlds

I came across an announcement for a program called Jurtle (java turtle) designed for teaching middle schoolers java programming. It is billed as more user friendly than generic IDE's. I will try it out and see. This begs the question - is there any reason to teach java to middle school children?

I should point before going further, I am biased. I write software for a living - at least I try to, so in general I think programming is a useful / interesting way to spend time.

so ... programming is good.

There have been a variety of approaches to teaching about programming languages and development environments designed for learning. These include BASIC, PASCAL, Logo, Squeak, and others, representing a range of pedagogical styles. With the exception of Basic, these are not languages commonly used for application programming.

logo

squeak

pascal

basic


In the real world, we see languages like Java, COBOL, C/C++, Perl - you can make your own list. In fact, a decade ago, the list would have been different.

so... programming languages are bad.

In other words, the things that should be taught are concepts, algorithms, and approaches to problem solving. The rest come and go. Teaching computer science is probably better than teaching a programming language.