Scratch

shadow_7283 wrote:

So how can I convince my future high school to add the CS course, even with budget cuts? 

Well, that's part of the reasoning for making it an AP course.  Good academic high schools tend to offer every possible AP course because it makes their students look good on college applications.  I think that whole system is stupid and evil, and have real mixed feelings about getting in bed with it, but don't worry, if it gets to be a real AP course (in 2013 maybe?) it'll be offered.

But, you won't need it!  You already understand recursion and higher order functions. 

When do you expect the first BYOB CS courses to appear?

The course already exists!  Follow the links on the BYOB page.  You can log into the Moodle server as "guest" and look at the labs.  And the other stuff is linked to on the course web page.  A few high schools around here are trying out some of the materials, but a full trial of the whole course will be next school year.  (I mean, trial in high schools.  We're already teaching it at Cal.)

Oh, and should we begin calling BYOB3 "Snap"?

The official answer right now is that it's BYOB 3.1 but Snap 4.0.

The Berkeley CS 10 planning group has, I swear, spent more time talking about this trivial question than about anything else.  Basically it's two people who don't like the name "BYOB," one of them a teacher who posted about it here and the other, crucially, the main developer of our Moodle labs who also teaches in a summer program we run for underrepresented local K-12 students.  Two people, but they both feel very strongly about it.  On the other side we have one high school teacher who hates the idea of changing the name and a bunch of us who'd rather leave it alone but don't feel strongly enough about it to fight about it.

Among other things, I didn't much enjoy the conversation in which I told Jens that some people at Berkeley thought he should change the name of his software.  Some of my colleagues seem to think that it's half mine, and therefore half ours, and therefore we all get a vote about it, but I've never felt that way.  I adamantly reject every step down that slope.

I'm also dreading the task of tracking down every reference to BYOB in the tutorials and the manual and the help screens...

But mainly, I don't get it, what's the problem, people think some 16-year-old, or even some 11-year-old, is going to think it's okay to drink alcohol because Jens made a cute pun in the name?  Or even that the kid will think that we think it's okay?  (And never mind that in France, where parents gradually introduce their kids to wine with dinner, from a sip to a glass over years, they don't have the kind of college student binge drinking problem we do.)

This is a microcosm of the general problem that every K-12 textbook in the United States has to adhere to the moral standards of (sorry, Shadow) Texas, disproportionally powerful because it's one of the two states in which textbook decisions are made statewide rather than locally.  (The other one is California, but we're all immoral heathens out here, so it's Texas that's the problem.)  I learned about this when I wrote the Logo books and gave a program example like this:

? downup "hello
hello
ETERNAL DARNATION
hel
he
h
he
hel
ETERNAL DARNATION
hello

... and one of the MIT Press editors told me the book would never be used in Texas because of the second line of program output.  (We'll see if it gets past fullmoon...  ) [Moderator edit: Couldn't resist!  ]

Sorry, I'm in a bad mood because I'm trying to do my !@#$%^& income tax, and I was having so much fun trying to figure out how to make sense of this 1099-B (the Turbo Tax help screen was no help at all) that I missed an appointment, and there's no food in the house. 

P.S. ... and in Australia, there's an official legal category of restaurant called a "BYO" which is licensed to pour the wine or beer that you bring with you, but not licensed to sell it to you, and they put that on their windows and everybody talks about BYO restaurants all the time and nobody worries that the kiddies will be corrupted.

P.P.S.  What the two people say isn't that they're personally offended, or even that kids will be corrupted, but that they're uncomfortable telling parents about BYOB because maybe they'll think their kids will be corrupted.  So, on the one hand, the two people aren't idiots, and on the other hand, this isn't even about morality; it's about fear.

Last edited by fullmoon (2011-04-06 07:30:54)

bharvey wrote:

But, you won't need it!  You already understand recursion and higher order functions. 

I don't understand it to the degree that you, Jens, nXIII, fullmoon, (etc.) do though. 
I'll be able to explore it more soon though. I can't wait for summer when the pressure of school is off and I'm free to explore the programming languages I've picked to their fullest. 

bharvey wrote:

The course already exists!

Interesting! I'll take a look at it some time.

bharvey wrote:

The official answer right now is that it's BYOB 3.1 but Snap 4.0.

Right, I figured that. Though I thought you might have convinced the stubborn moralists to keep it by now. 

bharvey wrote:

The Berkeley CS 10 planning group has, I swear, spent more time talking about this trivial question than about anything else.

Why am I not surprised?

bharvey wrote:

I'm also dreading the task of tracking down every reference to BYOB in the tutorials and the manual and the help screens...

Well that's the exact sort of busy-work I know I can handle.    Just let me know if you need some help!

bharvey wrote:

But mainly, I don't get it, what's the problem, people think some 16-year-old, or even some 11-year-old, is going to think it's okay to drink alcohol because Jens made a cute pun in the name?

+1

bharvey wrote:

...the United States has to adhere to the moral standards of (sorry, Shadow) Texas, disproportionally powerful because it's one of the two states in which textbook decisions are made statewide rather than locally.  (The other one is California, but we're all immoral heathens out here, so it's Texas that's the problem.)

This made my day.    I take no offense. It's impossible to believe and agree with everything Texan politicians (or officials) discuss. You should see Politifact. They have a field day on weekends, listing all the contradictions and lies made by our representatives. 

bharvey wrote:

Sorry, I'm in a bad mood because I'm trying to do my !@#$%^& income tax, and I was having so much fun trying to figure out how to make sense of this 1099-B (the Turbo Tax help screen was no help at all) that I missed an appointment, and there's no food in the house. 

Oh... I'm sorry.    I wish you luck!

bharvey wrote:

I've been staring at a computer screen all day.

Whats wrong with that? Computers can do anything (natural).

shadow_7283 wrote:

So how can I convince my future high school to add the CS course, even with budget cuts? 

When do you expect the first BYOB CS courses to appear?

Oh, and should we begin calling BYOB3 "Snap"?

Byob shares many features with the old and well known language Logo which benefits of a large number of books and web sites where you can find many examples, easily adaptable to Byob. Look for example at these 2 links :

http://www.xleroy.net/ByobTuto/thumbnails.html
http://www.xleroy.net/ByobTuto/New/Thumbnails.html and

fullmoon wrote:

bharvey wrote:

This is a microcosm of the general problem that every K-12 textbook in the United States has to adhere to the moral standards of (sorry, Shadow) Texas, disproportionally powerful because it's one of the two states in which textbook decisions are made statewide rather than locally.  (The other one is California, but we're all immoral heathens out here, so it's Texas that's the problem.)

When you said that, my mind immediately jumped to the evolution disclaimer stickers that Alabama was putting on their biology textbooks:

I like that.

ROFL!

And thanks for posting this hilarious reference, fullmoon. Actually I don't mind renaming BYOB to Snap. BYOB doesn't run well with non-English speaking users and when I first released BYOB the name was more of a joke between me and John Maloney, because at the time I did not believe that anyone would use it much at all. Personally I would have preferred a "real" name, like Alonzo instead of the very generic and non-descriptive term Snap, but then Snap is is a short four-letter word and can be pronounced easily in most spoken languages. Plus it reminds me of turtles. 

Last edited by Jens (2011-04-06 10:49:01)

Jens wrote:

the very generic and non-descriptive term Snap

What we need is for someone better at these things than I am to make a splash screen that starts like this:



and then the pieces move toward each other and there's a loud snap when they click together.     Oh and also an exclamation point appears after the name, and maybe the "NAP" shrinks a little (20%) so it's caps and small caps.  And then the whole thing fades out just as Alonzo appears on the stage.  Or maybe instead it shrinks down to a speech balloon next to him for 2 seconds. 

PS  It's not generic, it's an acronym: Software for the New Advanced Placement course!     Dan wants us to use that as the title for the NSF proposal.

Last edited by bharvey (2011-04-07 00:42:53)

@ Jens, what part of BYOB are you currently working on right now? Don't mean to pry.

Is BYOB 3.1 going to be in Squeak or something else?

ProgrammingFreak wrote:

scimonster wrote:

Is BYOB 3.1 going to be in Squeak or something else?

I think its gonna be BYOB4 and in JavaScript?

Jens wrote:

I'm currently working on 3.1.

ProgrammingFreak wrote:

scimonster wrote:

Is BYOB 3.1 going to be in Squeak or something else?

I think its gonna be BYOB4 and in JavaScript?

You're both right; there are two distinct versions in the works.

BYOB 3.1 is the one we've been posting alpha test versions of.  It's an extension of 3.0 to include first class sprites, and therefore it's written in Smalltalk/Squeak.  It should be released any week now.

BYOB 4.0 (which will be called Snap 4.0) is the complete rewrite in HTML5/Javascript.  It will be way faster (its biggest feature), will run in your browser, and will have more extensions, e.g., first class costumes.  But we're not promising any new features other than speed because it has to be done before UCB classes start in late August.  Once that deadline is met, we can take our time about 4.1, 4.2, etc. as needed until everything is first class. 

bharvey wrote:

Jens wrote:

the very generic and non-descriptive term Snap

What we need is for someone better at these things than I am to make a splash screen that starts like this:

http://cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/splash.png

I could do that when I get the time! I'm moderately talented at Blender, so I could probably pull it off.