ActionScript as a teaching language

[Paul King]

Hello

I wonder how this might get past some of you. I know that there are several high 
schools that teach ActionScript as part of a Grade 11 comptuer science course. 
That being said, that would make it a second language for many students. Grade 11 
introduces them to OOP, by the way.

While there is much about Flash and ActionScript that might sound attractive as 
something fun to give to teenagers, am I the only one that has problems with 
this? First of all, ActionScript not only requires you to learn a language, but 
it also requires quite a conceptual familiarity with Flash's animations, 
"layers", to say nothing of the general interface. I also feel that a language 
that finds statements such as

   x = "1" + 2; // "1" is converted to a number and added to 2
   message.text = "The answer is " + x; // converts x to string and concatenates

as being acceptable will probably confuse students more than teach them.

I understand that there seems to be a big push for this in the schools, mostly 
driven by the Computer Science teachers themselves. The reason given is they are 
afraid that giving them a real teaching language such as Turing or Pascal will 
cause students to lose interest and the Computer Science enrollment will dwindle. 
Frankly, I can't see the "fun" in teaching a language that constantly throws 
illogicality into its syntax rules which teachers are trying to teach them.

Paul King

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