Educational uses for Rev (was Re: Plea to sell Dan's book widely

[Marty Billingsley]

Devin Asay <devin_asay at byu.edu> writes:
> I've been following the discussion about Rev as a tool for educational
> s/w development. One of the perhaps overlooked uses of Rev in the
> educational setting is as an easy-to-learn, non-threatening environment
> for teaching programming concepts to non-techies.

Or even to techies!

Introductory programming was one of the best uses of HyperCard,
I thought, and have been trying to promote this with Rev.  We
switched over from HC a year ago with our 8th grade programming
class, and have been very happy with it.  Rev has, of course,
several advantages over HC; two biggies are its use of color and
the ability to save apps for any platform so students can take
their work home to show their folks.

I know of other schools that are hanging on with HC, who would
probably make the switch if readable documentation were available.
I used to be able to hand my students Danny Goodman's book and let
them look up things in the index.  My students can navigate Rev's
online help, but since they often don't know what keywords to look
for it isn't that useful.  There should be an index of concepts,
rather than keywords.  I'm thinking of creating a "recipe book"
that teachers could use with kids; there were several such for HC
that got a lot of teachers started.

The University of Chicago uses Rev in a CS class for non-techies.
Originally they used HyperCard and, I believe, the book "HyperCard
in a Hurry".  I'm sure they would like a Rev rewrite of it.

I guess we're back to talking about documentation :-)

Seriously, I think Rev should make a push in the schools; as Devin
said, it's an easy-to-learn, non-threatening programming environment.
Kids love it.

  - marty

--
Marty Billingsley (marty at ucls.uchicago.edu)
The University of Chicago Laboratory Schools