På Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:42:40 +0100, skrev pg <penang@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>:
> Hello to all the gurus here !
>
> I am in the process of setting up computers for a group of children,
> in the age between 7 to 12, who have never operate a PC before, with
> the intention to install educational / entertaining freewares for
> them.
>
> The computers will be Windows 98SE based, with Pentium III or better
> CPU, 256MB of RAM each. Graphic is VGA, mostly S3-powered graphic
> cards.
>
> I am thinking of installing Logo for them, but before I do that, I do
> need to ask the Gurus here for help.
>
> Before I continue, some background. I'm from Malaysia, a third world
> country, and the children that our computers are for are from poverty
> stricken families. The computers will be placed in a "after school
> hang out place" operated by a Catholic Charity organization. The
> children can understand the Chinese language but not very familiar
> with the English language.
>
> Okay, now .. which flavor of Logo do you think best suit the children,
> as well as the computers? Or if you know of any offering from Lisp and/
> or Dylan that suit this task, kindly please share.
>
> The computers are all donated stuffs, so they are not really fast, nor
> powerful. With 256MB of RAM each, I doubt they can run any fancy
> programs.
>
> Would be very grateful for any help / suggestion / pointer that you
> can offer.
>
> Thanks again !
Just thought I would warn you that Microsoft no longer sup****ts Windows
98.
This in particular means browsers and the like will be out of date.
Some plugins probably won't install some pages won't display right etc.
Personally I would feel better running a Linux and a new version of
Firefox or Opera.
What you save initially by not learning Linux could quickly be eaten up in
the time spent fixing problems.
Linux's can be gotten for free and Linux comes with a vast number of
languages out of the box.
For teaching programming I might suggest Python which is easy to learn.
There is a also a SmallTalk implementation called Squeak which is child
friendly, free, and not very demanding on resources. Java is the last
thing I would choose at it is almost guarantied to eat up all your
resources. (And it is a fairly difficult language to learn.)
--------------
John Thingstad
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