This seems to be a matter of preference, but some of my resources are for 2 and some for 3. There’s also the issue, though, of Python 2 v Python 3. Instead, the fuss is moved to layout, and spaces/tabs. There’s no fuss about declaring the type of variables and no worry about semi colons. Getting a basic program up and running is really fast and simple. Python seems much more straightforward, and I like the way you can work quickly and easily from the command line as well as writing programs. I wonder what else it has up its sleeves, and I also feel concerned about teaching a Microsoft-specific language. Small Basic concerns me because I discovered that it seems to overthink – when I tried adding strings together, because each string consisted of what it recognised as integers, it added them as integers.

I’ve tried Small Basic, Python and Java mainly, Java being both through Greenfoot and Processing. So far this summer I’ve been dabbling in all sorts of things. Then I feel I need to move onto a “proper” typed up language, and that’s where I hit the problem. I think it’s fairly straightforward to declare that I intend to use Scratch/BYOB to introduce various programming topics, as it’s straightforward to put the code together and the user can focus on structure without worrying too much about typos, syntax etc. It’s getting to the point where I need to make a decision how I’m going to proceed in September. That, as I see it, is the most useful and efficient way for them to learn, rather than plugging in lots of text-based code. Oh, and I might investigate Processing further as well – as I understand it, that also uses Java, and is also very visual, enabling students to see and visualise the results of their code much more easily. So we’ll continue with Greenfoot for a little longer, looking at the same constructs – if statements, loops etc – as we have in Python, and I’ll investigate the possibility of a simple editor that will help us create programs easily without panicking over how complex it is. Python is described as easy, and on some levels it is, but Greenfoot’s way of laying out code and colouring the blocks makes it straightforward to understand and read, and the braces indicate clearly where code blocks begin and end, and the Greenfoot environment makes it much easier than standard Java to work in. It feels grown-up, and produces effective, visible, entertaining results very quickly. Greenfoot can be just as complex, but it’s revealed part by part as they learn, rather than thrown at them all at once. Scratch is misleading, in my opinion: it looks as though it’s designed for younger kids, and it’s very easy to click blocks together and do something, but in fact it can get very complex very quickly when they want to do something specific, and it can be frustrating when they see all the blocks there but don’t understand how to use them, especially when their perception is that it should be easy because of the child-like design. Most importantly, they had experienced the wow factor that I had felt was lacking previously. The students who had previously seemed to lack motivation started experimenting and playing, and by the end of the lesson, curses over brackets and semi-colons aside, all agreed that they would like to see more Greenfoot. We started with Mik’s videos, and soon we had turtles crawling and spinning merrily on screen. However, I became interested to see what the kids would make of it. I had originally considered it as a learning tool, but rejected it because coursework for GCSE seems console-biased, and it seemed any editor that would edit Java to run in the console seemed unnecessarily complex for our use. So this afternoon we tried out Greenfoot. Bear in mind that this cohort has done very little coding previously, if any at all, and they’ve been finding it very difficult to think in the logical way needed to build up algorithms. We also had some fun with making the computers beep (thanks codeboom!).īut overall it felt slow, and some of the lower ability kids were finding it hard going. Wrong password, this computer will self destruct in 10.9.8.

We’ve been plodding along for a few weeks now with Python, and a few boys in particular have amused me with the way they’ve played with the code we’ve used, particularly input and loops:

Greenfoot play sound faster