Graeme Geldenhuys wrote 13 lines
Hi,
re: coding clubs for 9-11 year olds.
Has anybody thought of, or started working on, a "ide" equivalent of
Scratch for Free Pascal? My thinking is something like the Scratch
interface, by dropping puzzle pieces on the canvas, setting values to
control loops etc, and then possibly generating the equivalent Object
Pascal code from that.
An example of a Scratch project for a Coding Club.
https://www.codeclubprojects.org/en-GB/scratch/rock-band/This might be better in fpc-other.
The problem with that sort of graphical environment is that while it can represent program structure it's completely oblivious of any structured data.
With suitable graphical support it would probably be possible to have something "Scratch-like" where every item on the screen was an FPC object, but those items would end up being a comparatively thin wrapper around conventional code.
So either the children and their supervisors would have to be prepared to edit Pascal code fairly early, or it would take a large amount of design and implementation to build a general-purpose repertoire of items which would be comprehensive enough to satisfy both beginners and intermediate-level students.
Quite frankly, I'm not convinced that Pascal offers sufficient advantage over Smalltalk to make the effort worthwhile. And I'd definitely not like to be the one to raise my head above the parapet and tell the World that it ought to be using either language- and I write that from the POV of using Smalltalk for my MPhil, many years ago.
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
