Rev and education (Re: [Slightly OT?] Why It's Hard to Explain Rev)

[Andre Garzia]

On Nov 4, 2005, at 5:11 PM, Marty Billingsley wrote:

> And what do you say to non-programmers, particularly school  
> administrators
> who want to know why we should use this product to teach programming?
>
>   - marty

Marty,

for school admins try telling this points:

1) Cheap. Compare the prices of similar solutions, to teach  
programming all you need is dreamcard and there's some educational  
discount I think. I have this firm belief that looking in the eyes of  
school admins and saying the magic "not expensive" word will get you  
half the way.

2) Will run on old hardware. For Rev you don't need blazing fast  
machines with tons of hard drive and a lobotomy to install the  
software. Rev installs easy in small HD and runs nice in all kinds of  
machine.

3) Rev is easy to learn since the syntax resembles english, not  
roller coaster learning curve. So your students can spend more time  
learning the theory behind coding like data structures, algorithms,  
instead of spending months learning syntax of awkward languages like  
C....

4) Rev is a RAD tool, students like to see what they are building,  
it's like some visual feedback needed to give them strength to  
continue. RAD tools are great, I remember the first time I drag &  
dropped a button on a window and it worked... it's was like magic, I  
was in awe, my window had about 12 buttons, they did nothing useful  
but they were my first buttons....

5) Rev is a real world language and not a toy language like logo  
(although it can do logo like stuff), one can use it to create real  
projects so it makes sense using it instead of a incomplete toy  
language.


When I was 14 or 13 and was on school, we had no formal coding  
classes, we had a general "introduction to informatics" class that  
teached some DOS and Windows stuff and word processing. The school  
had no coding class but it would encourage one to learn coding on  
it's own. And how it did it? By supporting student projects.

Here in Brazil we like to believe in the voting process of democracy,  
so we have all kinds of call for votes everywhere, like schools and  
villages. My school had elections for student guild, for name of  
school sports teams, for where should we travel with the classmates.  
As I said we had no formal coding class, but they said to us that if  
we build a software to help the elections and thus keep more trees  
alive, they would use it. So we learned pascal and coded the thing  
and the school used it for years. We did some other software for  
daily use of the school but I cannot recall now.... Such projects  
could not be "done" in Logo (by done, I mean in a sane way) but would  
be piece of cake in Rev/Dreamcard. That's a way to market such tool  
for school use, if teachers could see how kids would be encouraged to  
pursuit tech careers if they built software at the school, real  
software, that the school would use, not critical software, simple  
one. I was one of those kids, when I saw the entire picture, code,  
deliver, people using it, thats when I decided that working with  
computers might be a good thing. I think sometimes teachers don't  
know how to make students feel like this.

my 2 cents
Is my english as incomprehensible as I think it is?

Cheers
andre