![]() (Java, of course, uses the C-style syntax, so these two goals are in conflict.)Īt first, we prioritised the Java-compatibility argument and chose the equality symbol. We had two competing goals: On the one hand, we wanted the syntax to be clear and expressive, but on the other hand we want Stride to be a pathway into Java, so there is also a strong incentive to be consistent with Java syntax. So when we designed our language Stride recently, the question surfaced again. I have always like this much better than the single equals and have always been mildly annoyed by the C-style syntax. Algol and Pascal, for example, already used a different symbol in the 1960s, quite explicitly to express the directionality more clearly, and to distinguish from equality: Many people have commented for a long time that the C-style equality-as-assignment is not ideal. So the equals symbol is interpreted as equality (“ b is the same as a“), which might then remain true for the future. ![]() The misconception is that variables, once expressed as equal, remain linked. This is not entirely unreasonable it is indeed an internally consistent mental model. What, now, is the value of b? For learners holding the equality misconception, it will be 7. This has been used in maths for centuries, and taught to most pupils before they ever encounter programming, and is quite different from assignment. The second possible misconception is related to the previously learned meaning of the equals symbol: to express equality. (And, of course, the direction is arbitrary language designers could just as well have decided the other way.) Which way does it assign? To all of us who have programmed for some time this may seem a silly question – we get used to the right-to-left semantics so thoroughly that we can hardly imagine it to be different. Some students have problems remembering which way it operates. Firstly, the equality operator is non-directional. There are several things that can be misinterpreted here. One of these, reported by several seasoned programming teachers, was the difficulty in interpreting the assignment symbol in C-style languages: I was at a Dagstuhl seminar recently, about programming education, and one of the things we discussed were common misconceptions of novice programmers. Recordings of these events will be accessible afterwards for viewing retrospectively.ĭon’t forget to mark this date in your diary with a big red pen and join us in a couple of weeks! Posted in Greenfoot, Java, Stride, Teaching | Tagged Greenfoot, Teaching | 3 Replies Talk about Greenfoot and Stride – London 18:00 in Germany, Scandinavia, Italy, France, …Īfter this first event on 8 May, we will host Greenfoot Live every two weeks.The first Greenfoot Live event will be held on You will have a chance to listen to us talk, as well as ask questions. We will discuss educational aspects, as well as general programming topics, related to Greenfoot. The event is aimed mostly at teachers who use Greenfoot in their classes, but also at general Greenfoot users. Greenfoot Live will be a regular chat event where members of the Greenfoot team will be live online and talk about Greenfoot, among ourselves and with you – the users of Greenfoot. Programming Education Chat With The Greenfoot Team ![]() ![]() In order to provide more ways to support teachers who are using Greenfoot (or thinking about using Greenfoot), as well as anyone else interested in Greenfoot, we are starting a series of live chat sessions: Posted in Research, Stride | Tagged Paper, Stride | Leave a reply Greenfoot LIVE I would like to thank all our reviewers who contributed many useful comments and suggestions, especially Jens Mönig and John Maloney, and the special editions editor Franklyn Turbak. The rest of the special issue is very much worth reading as well – you can find it here. It has been published in a special edition of the Journal of Visual Languages and Sentient Systems (focussed on blocks programming). Kölling, Brown & Altadmri: Frame-Based Editing I’m glad it is out now you can read it here: It also describes related work and background (which you might like to read in its own right if you are interested in the history of block-based systems or structure editing), and a few small user studies. In parallel, we have worked on a comprehensive paper, describing the design ideas and rationale behind many of the detailed aspects. Then, more recently, we also incorporated Stride into BlueJ, making the new frame-based editor available to a much larger audience. We (that is: Neil, Amjad and I) have worked on Stride and its frame-based editor for about four years now, and there is a lot of work in it.įirst, Stride was designed and released as part of Greenfoot, and we wrote a few smaller papers about specific aspects of use cases around Stride. ![]()
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