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Re: [LUG] Summary Todays Holsworthy Meeting - June 17th

 

 On 17/07/2010 20:28, John Williams wrote:
On Sat, 2010-07-17 at 19:26 +0100, Dave Foxcroft wrote:

I support a number of schools and have tried many times to get them to
move away from MS but they are reluctant to do so.. I have managed to
get various opensource apps in tho' -the normal suspects - GIMP, OOo,
Scribus .... Maybe I can discuss some reasons why schools won't/can't
move away from MS when I get to a meeting.
Sure, it would be interesting to hear.

Have you tried Scratch - http://scratch.mit.edu/
   I saw this being demo'd at a presentation at this years BETT show in
January.
It is aimed at KS3 -KS4 but one of the teachers I met at BETT was using
it with yr5/6 kids so maybe your 9 year old may be able to take to it.
My 8 year old is going to have a go with it over the summer - he like
the idea of being able to make his own games!
I had not heard of Scratch before. It looks to be along the same lines
as EToys from a quick look on the site. I would like to start him off
with something more Basic, perhaps even with line numbers and the like.
It would look pretty as something to move onto once he has an
understanding of programming concepts.

Just a thought, maybe you could try him on an emulator, maybe a Spectrum, Amstrad or BBC Micro emulator?

I gather at least the BBC Basic was one of the best ones (if not the best) from that era.

Looking at http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcbasic.html it appears there are even BBC Basic interperators available, according to the site the Windows version runs on Wine, or there is a GPL'd implementation of BBC Basic V called Brandy Basic which is available for Linux.

Rob

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