Casimiro de Almeida Barreto a écrit :
Gary Dunn escreveu:
I am planning an introductory course in Smalltalk for high school students. This will be starting from scratch; no previous programming experience required. The goal is to be able to create self-made personal software.
To this end I have been working through The Laser Game Tutorial and Squeak by Example. Neither seem right for beginners.
Can anyone recommend any other books or teaching materials? Maybe a successful syllabus?
I know that there are some people from Spain with an extremely rich experience in this topic. People from Conselho de Extremadura and I guess some of them are present at this list.
Hello Gary
I think the Spanish friend of Extremadura are focusing on Etoys use.
What about using a dedicated Smalltalk environment to learn Smalltalk programming?
Come to my mind:
- BotsInc and the book Learning programming with robots? http://scg.unibe.ch/wiki/botsinc/
- Related to mathematics teaching in secondary education, DrGeo (http://wiki.laptop.org/go/DrGeo) is a Smalltalk environment for interactive geometry with dedicated programming facilities (scripting and programmed figure) See this example of Smalltalk scripting with DrGeo http://blog.ofset.org/hilaire/index.php?post/script-drgeo (a google translation link is provided at the end of the document)
DrGeo scripting is a very lovely way to introduce problem solving methodologies in a quite comfortable way. Well, I am a math teacher...
For a polished general introduction to DrGeo, read this English document http://blog.ofset.org/public/drgeo/drgeo-EsugAwards2008.pdf
Previous version of DrGeo was written in C++ with an embedded Scheme interpretor for scripting and user programming. Really the DrGeo Smalltalk version is much more user friendly when it comes to user programming, thanks to the Smalltalk IDE tools and image experience.
You are nice to your learner planing to use Smalltalk, a big boost in ease to learn programming.
Unfortunately, I have not yet re-written the companion book for DrGeo programming in Smalltalk. (A previous version in Spanish for the C++ version http://documentation.ofset.org/drgeo/es/drgenius.html)
Any organisation willing to support its rewrite?
Hilaire