Background
jLogo Programming
- Commanding a Turtle
- Pseudocode
- Adding New Commands
- Iteration & Animation
- Hierarchical Structure
- Procedure Inputs
- Operators & Expressions
- Defining Operators
- Words & Sentences
- User Interface Events
- What If? (Predicates)
- Recursion
- Local Variables
- Global Variables
- Word/Sentence Iteration
- Words as Data
- Multiple Turtles
- Arrays
Java
- A Java Program
- What's a Class?
- Extending Existing Classes
- Types
- Turtle Graphics
- Control Flow
- Input Events
Appendices
Lastly
Acknowledgments
This material has evolved over a period of eight years. The roots are in classes I taught at Longfellow Arts and Technology Middle School (LATMS) and continue to teach at UC Berkeley for BFOIT. It is also used locally at Albany High School.
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.
The new looks for the website are thanks to Florian Plank. Thanks Florian!
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.
- From Molecule to Metaphor, Jerome A. Feldman, MIT Press.
- High-Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom. Clifford Stoll, Doubleday.
- How to Solve It, G. Polya, Princeton.
- In Code, Sarah Flannery with David Flannery, Workman Publishing.
- Introduction to Computing and Programming in Java: A Multimedia Approach, Mark Guzdial & Barbara Ericson, Prentice Hall.
- The Java Programming Language, Ken Arnold & James Gosling, Addison Wesley.
- The Mathematical Universe, William Dunham, John Wiley & Sons.
- 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.
- Personal Dynamic Media, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg, IEEE Computer, March 1977.
- 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.
- Thinking About Logo, John R. Allen, Ruth E. Davis, John F. Johnson, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
- Visual Modeling with Logo, James Clayson, MIT Press.
Web Sites
- Brian Harvey, UC Berkeley.
- Engines for Education.
- Interactive Programming in Java, Lynn Andrea Stein, MIT CS101.
- java.sun.com
- The Logo Foundation
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