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It's nice to see a reply from an actual educator. Maybe you could elaborate on your experience. How was the language selected? Did you ever try a language speci

It's nice to see a reply from an actual educator. Maybe you could elaborate on your experience. How was the language selected? Did you ever try a language specifically designed for pedagogical purposes? I can't find anything on the author's page about being an educator, so I assume they're talking about what they themselves would have preferred.

primitivesuave 5y ago
I started a Bay Area summer camp in 2013 and expanded it over five years into multiple locations and a year-round after-school program. Java is widely known for its role in the AP Computer Science course, so there is a pretty strong demand from parents. I also developed introductory courses for Python, and built a custom browser-based teaching platform with Skulpt (skulpt.org) - the idea was to give kids a giant green run button so they would keep testing and iterating on their programs, and to parse the native Python error messages into helpful suggestions. My contention with the article is that instead of bringing up any real issues that educators have with Eclipse (my list goes on and on), it instead posits that students would be better served by using the command line and `javac`. It strikes me as completely ignorant toward the realities that come from a diverse group of students with varying degrees of prior knowledge. Unfortunately, this opinionated pedagogical thinking makes its way into curriculum all the time. My opinion, supported by years of physical presence at the head of many classes, is that students are most successful when they have fun. Dealing with the terminal, or really any repetitive process, is not fun. This is why my entire Java curriculum explained concepts through animation and game design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNphPVif26I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNphPVif26I), while trying to lift as much of the burden of syntax and the runtime environment. Eclipse is open-source, and I'd love to see an article that motivates an Eclipse developer to create a kid-friendly version of the software for classrooms.

primitivesuave 5y ago

I started a Bay Area summer camp in 2013 and expanded it over five years into multiple locations and a year-round after-school program. Java is widely known for its role in the AP Computer Science course, so there is a pretty strong demand from parents. I also developed introductory courses for Python, and built a custom browser-based teaching platform with Skulpt (skulpt.org) - the idea was to give kids a giant green run button so they would keep testing and iterating on their programs, and to parse the native Python error messages into helpful suggestions. My contention with the article is that instead of bringing up any real issues that educators have with Eclipse (my list goes on and on), it instead posits that students would be better served by using the command line and `javac`. It strikes me as completely ignorant toward the realities that come from a diverse group of students with varying degrees of prior knowledge. Unfortunately, this opinionated pedagogical thinking makes its way into curriculum all the time. My opinion, supported by years of physical presence at the head of many classes, is that students are most successful when they have fun. Dealing with the terminal, or really any repetitive process, is not fun. This is why my entire Java curriculum explained concepts through animation and game design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNphPVif26I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNphPVif26I), while trying to lift as much of the burden of syntax and the runtime environment. Eclipse is open-source, and I'd love to see an article that motivates an Eclipse developer to create a kid-friendly version of the software for classrooms.