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Educational environments to learn programming

I will be teaching introductory programming to total newbies in Q3 of this year.
The programming language is totally up to me to decide.
I'm looking for a language+environment that will not place too high a demand on learning the editors/IDEs.

What would be your recommendations ?
I'm looking for something in line with:

Thanks.

Gavin

By chihiro at 2008-03-10 03:58 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 5627 reads

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Logo?

Logo can bootstrap you quickly and will be able to help you even in the higher realms.

By Rahul Gopinath at Mon, 2008-03-10 05:11 | login or register to post comments

not enough information

For example, the TeachScheme project (including software artifacts such as language levels and graphics libraries) is about how to teach scheme on a roughly high school level. For undergrad science majors, I've seen a very well received intro based on matlab (though R may make sense as a free, functional alternative). For the web gen, javascript will take you pretty far, but I haven't seen a convincing introductory language for the server portion (nor one that integrates the two). For strong students, I still like SICP :)

By lmeyerov at Mon, 2008-03-10 05:50 | login or register to post comments

GNU Smalltalk

GNU Smalltalk might be more appropriate than Squeak, since it's a more standard file-based Smalltalk.

By naasking at Mon, 2008-03-10 13:47 | login or register to post comments

Have to be PLT-Scheme

I partially agree with lmeyerov. PLT-scheme is a quite good IDE for beginners, and you can choose either HtDP or SICP (for high school/non-tech level, or for strong students).

By Chongkai at Tue, 2008-03-11 22:55 | login or register to post comments