

Kojo - Scala for Kids - skorks
http://www.scala-lang.org/node/5624

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stan_rogers
Whoa. It takes more than a turtle to make a Logo. The neat thing about Logo
was that kids, even at an extremely young age, could leverage their budding
English language skills to do some amazing things in very Lisp-y ways,
starting with something as simple as "tell turtle go up 5" and seeing that
work. No defs, no need to build scaffolding of any kind to get immediate
feedback. This may be simple, but there'd be a lot of hand-holding needed for
the little 'uns.

~~~
ewjordan
Well, according to the docs, the following code works:

repeat (4) {

    
    
        forward(100) 
    
        right() 
    

}

which implies that a lot of the usual Scala scaffolding can be omitted (kind
of like immediate mode in Processing, which lets you eliminate most Java
boilerplate for simple drawing tasks).

Haven't actually played with it myself, though, so I can't comment further...

Looks very interesting, in any case. I was excited when a Scala version of the
Processing environment was released, but that project seems to have been
abandoned (or rather, it was only a proof of concept anyways), so it's nice to
see someone run full steam ahead with the idea.

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samdk
My opinion on Scala is that while it's a much nicer language than Java, it's
going to be quite difficult to pick up unless you have previous programming
experience in at least one of Java or an ML-like language. If this can
successfully teach kids Scala as a first language I'm very, very impressed.

------
davidfstr
Scala as a first programming language? Whoo. Scala is the richest language
I've interacted with so far.

But then again you can't underestimate motivated kids with infinite free time.
I certainly remember that my own abilities were vastly underestimated when I
was a youngling.

