Birmingham University's Prof Aaron Sloman has been exploring ways of providing an environment for school students interested in learning about programming and AI under Linux, as part of the Computing At Schools project. This might well be of interest to schools who would like to facilitate collaboration between their students and those studying elsewhere, as well as those who are hesitant about providing their own Linux box for students to work on.

He writes:

I have now had a detailed discussion with our senior computer officer. He thinks one of our linux servers ('tinky' running CentOS 5 (Free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux) could be used for CAS people who would like to experiment with remote learning/teaching and collaboration. The machine has 4GBytes Ram, four Intel Xeon 2.4Ghz CPUs, and fast network connections to our departmental file store, which is backed up every night. The machine runs all day every day, and is also used by staff and students for project work, but at present usage is light.

This machine could support quite a lot of users who are mostly reading (or writing) documentation, working in an editor, and compiling and testing programs, without a huge amount of graphical traffic or audio.

Our support team would not be able to provide any help for external users, apart from setting up their accounts, so that would depend on our users (like me) being willing to answer questions, etc. When I know who wants to try using our system, I'll collect volunteer helpers. (We already have a 'linux-users' email list.)

If you are interested in using this facility, please write to me about what you would like to do, where you are, etc.

Anyone who wants to try using this will have to be registered as a user. This will require filling in and signing this form

http://supportweb.cs.bham.ac.uk/account-apply/account_apply.pdf

and being accepted as an 'Honorary research associate' (e.g. collaborating with me).

As I've mentioned previously, one of the program development environments we can make available for this purpose is Poplog, which includes support for several languages, Pop-11, Common Lisp, Prolog and Standard ML, along with a lot of teaching material for AI and general programming at various levels of sophistication from absolute beginner onwards, introducing a wide range of control constructs and data-types, as well as packages extending the language to support particular programming paradigms.

I have provided sample pointers to a small subset of the 'teach' files here (all of which can be browsed via the web, but are also included in Poplog if you download it to a local machine):

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplog.html#teaching

They are all usable, but in need of improvement! (I can make that section of the file available as a separate file, if that will help anyone).

If anyone would find it useful, I could assemble various components of the existing documentation into a package to give someone who is not already a programmer a taste of several different styles of programming, and different ways of composing program fragments into a functioning whole.

My aim would be to undermine many common myths about programming, e.g. that it involves composing lists of instructions, or that all programming rests on manipulation of numbers, or numbers and strings. For instance, intermediate stages in understanding or generating a sentence in English could involve assembling a tree structure, as could forming a plan. It is even possible (easy in Pop-11, Lisp, Prolog, Scheme) for a program to create new programs, undermining the notion that there's a distinction between programs and data.

Anyone reading the existing Poplog documentation may be puzzled by some aspects of the format. It has that format because when the documentation is read in the Poplog editor (Ved or XVed) the documents and program libraries are automatically hyperlinked to one another. So if a document says 'See TEACH * LISTS' then a user can put the editor cusor on the asterisk, type ESC then 'h' and the editor will find and display a tutorial file on lists. If the file includes LIB * TURTLE then ESC+h will make the editor search for a program library file called turtle.p (This was developed long before internet browsers.)

The files can also be read through another preferred editor or web browser, though the links will not work.

A separate unix/linux shell window is needed to compile and run code.

I suspect a similar mode of working would be required for the other languages on our system, including python, perl, bash, tcsh, ruby, java, C, C++, haskell (ghc), and probably several more.

Probably other institutions can provide a different mix of offerings.

I have been looking (briefly) at a few of the graphical programming environments now on offer for young children and I have very serious doubts about what they can achieve, which I'll try to summarise later.

(Compare learning to use a jukebox vs learning to play a musical instrument or read/compose music.)

There'll be a chance to see these tools in action in Prof Sloman's session at the forthcoming Unconference; his session his scheduled for 11:55 in Seminar Room 1a.