[K12OSN] Programming Languages
"Terrell Prudé, Jr."
microman at cmosnetworks.com
Thu Jul 22 22:16:42 UTC 2004
If I were you, I would get a hold of the folks at Yorktown High School
in Arlington, VA. They use Python for this purpose on LTSP, and I
happened by there one evening during one of their LUG meetings. I don't
remember what the IDE used at Yorktown was called, but I remember
programming in Visual BASIC back in the day, and their Python IDE
reminded me a lot of VB. Matter of fact, at the teacher's suggestion, I
actually sat down and did some basic Python programming, and I'd never
done Python before. I remember thinking, hey, this is pretty easy.
--TP
Liam Marshall wrote:
> In the past years, while working with the evil empire of Microsoft, I
> was teaching among other things, two programming classes. One Grade
> 11 class using the medium of Visual Basic, and one grade 12 class
> using the medium of Java.
>
> I have managed to convince the school to let me break away from the
> evil empire and go to linux in the lab completely. Specifically, I am
> using K12LTSP with thin clients. I have 32 workstations all
> connecting to my server now,( a bit of work but worth it compared to
> the wiping out of workstation hard drives and reloading from scratch
> that I do every year during the summer)
>
> I have Java workable on the workstations and am using an IDE from SUN
> (NetBeans IDE 3.6) it works great!
>
> Now I am looking for a replacement for Visual Basic, which will never
> work under Linux. It doesn't have to be Visual Basic, I was just
> using it before because frankly, it was an easy to learn language with
> alot of mouse work. The operative word is EASY. That way I could
> focus on the concepts of programming without having to focus on
> learning the mechanics of the programming language. With Visual Basic
> the mechanics comes more or less naturally.
>
> What I would like is some language usable with linux that is of a
> similar nature. I would prefer a language that has a nice visual
> component (IDE, read EASY) so that the students introduction to
> programming is not like throwing them into the deep end of the pool of
> programming.
>
> Does such an animal exist? And did I mention that it should be free,
> at least for schools? I convinced them to let me go to Linux at least
> partially with the argument that cost was minimal, if anything.
>
> Please advice. I appreciate all your help, in advance
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