[racket] Making animations in racket (or, why racket is hard to transition to from scratch)

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 10:23 AM, Matthias Felleisen <matthias at ccs.neu.edu>wrote:

>
> On Feb 1, 2011, at 9:27 PM, Yaron Minsky wrote:
>
> > I'm finding it to be rather tough going, mostly because a lot of things
> that are really easy in scratch seem surprisingly hard in racket.
>
> [I thought we had discussed this before.]
>
> Scratch/Alice/Kodu are "low floor, low ceiling" languages. Indeed, "low
> ceiling" should almost be replaced with "no-escape ceiling". Their inventors
> know the purpose of such "introductions to programming."



> In contrast, the teaching languages of Racket are 'high floor, smooth path
> to full power". Our goals are
>  (1) to help improve students' math skills; what they write down is plain
> math and yet they get a game
>        the transfer of skills back to the math curriculum is demonstrable
>  (2) to teach some basic computational design skills
>  (3) to provide an entry point from which it is easy to move on to a
> full-fledged language that has
>        first-class functions, modules, functor-like component systems,
> first-class classes,
>        a rich set of libraries, etc.
>

Absolutely.  This is why I want to teach my kids Racket!  Some of the extra
difficulties involved in using Racket go hand-in-hand with the extra power,
and I'm happy to pay that cost.  But I do think that some of the bumps in
the road are unnecessary, and worth fixing.  Making structs easier to use,
and improving the speed of the graphics both seem like good steps, and seem
in line with what you guys are thinking anyway, so I think there's little
disagreement.

Something I'm struggling with now pedagogically is how to handle geometry in
reasonable way with a kid who doesn't yet know trigonometry.  Scratch and
logo's approach of using sprites lets you get pretty far without
understanding trig, but I've found image.ss to be considerably harder.  I'm
just starting to try an approach of having two types, a posn and a polr,
representing cartesian and polar coordinates respectively, and provide
functions for converting back and forth.  I'm still not sure how that's
going to pan out...


> > I'd be interested in suggestions with is how to deal with updating a
> struct in a clean way.
>
> For the 2e languages, I am considering adding a facility for using paths
> into structure trees to reference values and to update fields. I have a
> prototype, but things just keep piling up.
>
> -- Matthias
>
>
>
>
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