How about Javascript? Re:ActionScript as a teaching language

[Zoltan]

William Park wrote:

>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.
>
>  
>
IMHO I don't know if students would be that confused with statements 
like "x = "1" + 2" anymore, I know, coming from a C background, the fist 
time I saw stuff like this in PHP, it caught my attention, though if you 
don't come to a language with the idea that something is either a number 
or a string, maybe it makes sense.

Even in PHP I still make sure I initialize a variables (most of the 
time), out of habit just because every language I used when I was 
learning required it (and it's still a good idea, even if PHP doesn't 
enforce it). Students coming to programming now probably don't have 
those assumptions.

If you're looking for language suggestions, another idea might be 
Javascript with Firefox 1.5.
Javascript is certainly a OO language (though you can do things 
procedurally as well, and apparently some people say you can write in a 
functional style as well) and it's got real-world applications, 
certainly if students wanted to get into web design (certainly true with 
Flash/Actionscript).

The reason I include FF1.5 is that that you have the <canvas> and SVG 
stuff to play with. I know when I was learning to program in high 
school, trying to write a game was what kept me interested. Firefox also 
has a bunch of free development tools (inc. a Javascript debugger) so 
the costs of (legally) equipping a class full of students with a 
development environment is that much lower.

Zoltan

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