The initial "Introduction to Java" programming class was an idea that Nancy Elnor, the technology coordinator at LATMS, came up with.  I "sort of" volunteered to do it in a conversation I had with Nancy at a the technology in education conference (NECC) in 1999.

It has turned out to be quite a challenge.  Teaching computer programming to 6th through 8th grade students is much harder than I thought it would be.  So, my thanks go out to the experts in this field.  This set of notes is a combination of concepts I gleaned from books and papers written by Brian Harvey, Seymour Papert, George Polya, Elliot Soloway, and others.  Everyone I've met at UC Berkeley has been inspirational, has helped out.  My thanks go out to all of them for their dedication to the art/science of education.

Here is a short list of my favorite sources of enlightenment:

Books and Papers

• Being Fluent with Information Technology, Committee on Information Technology Literacy, National Academy Press.
• Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy, Andrea A. DiSessa, MIT Press.
• The Children's Machine, Seymour Papert, BasicBooks.
• Computer Science Logo Style, Brian Harvey, MIT Press.
• Designing World-Class E-Learning, Roger C. Schank, McGraw-Hill.
• How to Solve It, G. Polya, Princeton.
• The Java Programming Language, Ken Arnold & James Gosling, Addison Wesley.
• Mindstorms, Seymour Papert, BasicBooks.
• A Model Curriculum for K-12 Computer Science: Final Report of the ACM K-12 Task Force Curriculum Committee, CSTA, ACM.
• The Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky, Simon & Schuster.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Harold Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman, MIT Press.
• Teaching the Nintendo Generation to Program, Mark Guzdial & Elliot Soloway, Communications of the ACM.
• Visual Modeling with Logo, James Clayson, MIT Press.

Web Sites

• Interactive Programming in Java, Lynn Andrea Stein, MIT CS101.
• java.sun.com
• The Logo Foundation