ActionScript as a teaching language

[Igor Denisov]

> 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.

Using ActionScript in this context is quite the good idea.
As mentioned in the "Open Source in High Schools" thread, the current
trend in high school CS is towards flashy "cool" things.
Flash is exactly that.

Students might gain an appreciation of ActionScript/programming over
drawing when animations made using ActionScript transformations take
up several orders less disk space that the hand-animated versions of
the same and needed only a fraction of the time to code.

> 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

ActionScript isn't that difficult to pick up either (as long as the
objects are named in a way that you can remember).

As long as the CS teachers don't require that each line is commented
in the way you did, the entire experience should be quite enjoyable
for the type of student that takes grade 11 CS.

Also, considering how popular sites like newgrounds.com (used to be
mostly Flash games and animations) are with the high school crowd, a
course where Flash is taught at a higher than "draw a box and animate
it" level will be quite popular.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml