Supercard 4.8 public beta

[Roger Eller]

Scratch might be a digital version of Richmond's cups method.  I was
impressed many years ago with his description of putting things into cups
to teach children the concept of variables, writing the name of the var on
the cup, and changing their contents.  You can even put a variable into
another variable, and therefore its content travels with it (same with
cups).

~Roger

On Oct 15, 2016 1:42 PM, "Richard Gaskin" <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
wrote:

> Richmond wrote:
>
> > Thank you, Richard Gaskin, for clarifying that.
> >
> > What that does do is confirm my view that teaching children stuff
> > such as Scratch at school has little or no value in the sense that
> > it is NOT a programming language.
>
> I would caution against using the rants of a programmer as a substitute
> for sound pedagogy. :)
>
> And in all fairness, even in my ignorance of good teaching methods for
> kids I know just enough about Piaget to have included:
>
>    Scratch is an undeniably valuable tool for young minds.
>
> There's a place for very simple tools in the early stages of introducing
> kids to algorithmic thinking.  Many times such exercises begin quite well
> on paper, only later graduating to things like Scratch.
>
> Scratch is accessible because it has well-defined boundaries.
>
> After a series of exercises, those boundaries will become walls.
>
> And that's the moment to introduce scripting.
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  ____________________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
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