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From: darek <darek.maksimiuk@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: sdlada, löve, and programming for beginners
Date: Sun, 3 Oct 2021 10:45:16 -0700 (PDT)	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <392a6283-3336-46f4-840b-888f0a278ec7n@googlegroups.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87tv41cnnd.fsf@samuel>

On Saturday, 8 February 2020 at 12:41:01 UTC+1, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Hello. 
> 
> At FOSDEM, my colleague Thomas Maluszycki gave a talk[1] about rapid 
> application development in Ada. This made me think. You see, I have a 
> 14-year-old son whom I teach programming to. He is lukewarm about it 
> but I think it is my duty as a parent to give him basic education in 
> this field, as computers are already everywhere and will probably govern 
> his live even more than ours. So I played with him with Colobot[2], 
> taught him a little bit of Ada (with the French translation of Barnes' 
> book for Ada 95), a little bit of ZX Spectrum BASIC, and now he's 
> writing a Pong clone with the LÖVE framework[3], in Lua[4]. This 
> framework makes it very easy to have immediate results... but Lua lacks 
> strong typing and in particular range checking, and a debugger. 
> 
> So it occurred to me that LÖVE is really a Lua binding to SDL plus a 
> predefined event loop, and that it would be quite easy to do something 
> similar based on the sdlada thick binding. The goal would be to attract 
> teenage programmers to the language and to programming in general. 
> Possibly on a Raspberry Pi. I'd be willing to make a Debian package for 
> it. What do you think? 
> 
> [1] https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/ada_rad/ 
> [2] http://colobot.info/ 
> [3] http://love2d.org/ 
> [4] https://www.lua.org/ 
> 
> -- 
> Ludovic Brenta. 
> The partners leverage consumer-facing potentials.

Hi Ludovic,
  there could be an alternative for teaching kids programming. Have a look at Object Oriented Turing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_(programming_language)).
  Strong typed, with a simple syntax, and powerful constructs. The language was used at University of Toronto, and in high schools in Ontario. 

The only drawback is that the system is no longer maintained. 

 - Object Oriented Turing Reference:
          http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/OOTRef.pdf
- Introduction to Programming in Turing:
          http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/IPT.pdf
- The environment:
     http://tristan.hume.ca/openturing/
-  ... and more here ...
     http://compsci.ca/holtsoft/

Regards,
  Darek

      parent reply	other threads:[~2021-10-03 17:45 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-02-08 11:40 sdlada, löve, and programming for beginners Ludovic Brenta
2020-02-08 12:29 ` Optikos
2020-02-09 17:34 ` Rick Newbie
2020-02-09 19:26   ` Lucretia
2020-02-09 20:01   ` Dmitry A. Kazakov
2020-02-10 14:06     ` Simon Wright
2020-02-09 22:55   ` Ludovic Brenta
2020-02-10 14:07     ` Simon Wright
2020-02-10  4:53   ` Nasser M. Abbasi
2020-02-10 10:05     ` Rick Newbie
2020-02-10 10:37       ` gautier_niouzes
2020-02-10 17:47         ` Rick Newbie
2020-02-10 14:27 ` Lucretia
2020-02-11 19:10 ` Chris Sykes
2020-02-11 19:25   ` Lucretia
2021-10-03 12:59 ` Tama McGlinn
2021-10-03 17:45 ` darek [this message]
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