LETTER OF THE MONTH
Learning languages
Given that you have mentioned APL and 3D printing recently, I thought I would share an experience.
My daughter asked me to introduce my 10-year-old granddaughter to programming. Having spent 40-plus years implementing APL, it might have been my natural choice, but I didn’t choose it. What I did choose was OpenScad (scripted CAD). My granddaughter had been quite fascinated watching the 3D printer, so it seemed a reasonable choice. OpenScad is a functional language and really suitable for geometrically shaped objects.
We worked together. I’m a rotten teacher but I managed to resist taking control too much. At the end, she had a hollow cube with her initials as cutouts in the sides. In the process, she saw how we can juggle a bit. The OpenScad was running on my desktop – a 28-inch monitor helps. The 3D printer was running attached to my laptop. So, we moved the finished design to the laptop from the desktop via a USB stick. That physicality keeps the thinking grounded.
That ability to walk away with an actual object was, I think, really important for her. A week later and she had produced a design for a piano on her own – it wasn’t very good but she had clearly grasped the concepts. A few years later and she is doing a computing GCSE and apparently enjoying it.
Incidentally, Cura LulzBot would install on Fedora, which is what I run on the laptop. The desktop runs Tumbleweed. The Cura LulzBot situation has got worse and I now run it from a Mac Mini. I ought to dig my way into why it doesn’t work but haven’t.
Geoff Streeter
Neil says…
OpenScad is a new one on me, I’ll go look it up. As you say, though, children (and let’s face it, adults are only a bigger version) really respond well to code that produces immediate and visible results. It strikes me that OpenScad is almost a modern version of the old Turtle graphics, but rather than drawing 2D on screen, it’s 3D in real life.
Thanks for letting us know; stories like this are really helpful for showing us how readers are using Linux and open source.