ActionScript as a teaching language

[William Park]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2005 at 10:08:37AM -0500, Paul King wrote:
> 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.

How about Python?  It has "OOP" stuff, but it can be taught as
procedural to start.

In fact, for Grade 11, even Awk is sufficient.  Awk syntax is like C, so
you can teach C very easily afterwards.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
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