Marla Parker's Weblog

Classroom not School Club, maybe...
My plans for the Play 2 Learn Computer Club are on hold. I met recently with a dear friend, Smadar Agmon, who has built up a substantial math tutoring business in Los Altos in recent years. My after school club idea is just a volunteer effort, but I figured it would be wise to run the idea by her.

Smadar and I worked together as programmers in the mid-80s at Daisy Systems, and now we only see each other once or twice a year. Going to her house feels very time-warpish!

She gave me this advice: take every single opportunity you get to talk to teachers.

So when Bruce Anderson, the AP/CS teacher at the local high school called me on Saturday (!) morning before school started on Monday, I talked to him. He'd just gotten back in town, he apologized for not responding to my email sooner and asked if I wanted to come over to talk? Heeding Smadar's advice, I popped over to the high school right after lunch.

I gave Bruce a little demo of greenfoot.org and showed him the greenfootgallery.org also. He had looked at the website but had not gotten around to the summer task of playing with it for real. He commented that it looks a lot like GridWorld, which he showed to me.

I said, "Oh! that is the thing that Cay Hosrtmann created, right? Do you use that in your AP CS class?"

Bruce replied yes, and they have to use it because it is the case study for the exam. He went on to lavish praise on the books that Cay Horstmann has written, saying they are so much easier for him to read than any of the other text books or programming books! Cay is also a fan of Greenfoot (see here) and Alice. Later, searching for more info on Gridworld, I found GridWorld in Greenfoot.

Bottom line, Bruce invited me to come spend one or two class sessions with his Intro Programming class (not the AP/CS class) to teach them Greenfoot. I'm going to send him my lesson plan to review, just as soon as I write it, or he may send me some suggestions, whichever one of us gets to it sooner!

Depending on how that goes, Bruce and I would like to come up with some dramatic creative compelling plan to increase the number of girls who take his classes. He says they always do very well, and they always expect to do poorly. He told me one year he had more girls than usual because a single girl persuaded all her friends to sign up! They all did great.