[NCSA-discuss] editors in windows, Mac

[Joseph Mack NA3T]

On Sun, 3 Feb 2008, A. Michael Salim wrote:

>
> I concur with Simon, vi and emacs should be taught on 
> their own, they are not for beginners.

I replied to Simon off-list saying that I hoped not to get 
bogged down in teaching an editor and hoped that I'd be able 
to use something already on the machine that they'd played 
with.

> I would stick with notepad on Windows, it comes bundled 
> with windows and even my 8 year old daughter handles it 
> with intuitive ease.  I am pretty sure she is not ready 
> for Python yet :-)

Yes you've got to have something within the grasp of the 
kids.

My wife was looking for summer camps for our son (13yrs old) 
and found computer camps for 7th grade kids on astrophysics 
and on computational chemistry.

I went to college with the idea of becoming an astronomer 
(which I didn't do, but still have an interest in) and now 
40yrs later, I still don't know enough about astrophysics to 
do a week's computing on it. What are 7th graders going to 
do? calculate the collapse of a neutron star, do a maximum 
entropy 2-D fourier transform on radio telescope map data? 
run the nlogn gravitional code? You'd have to be a coding 
fiend to do this. What are 7th graders going to be doing?

Computational chemistry (predicting the binding of ligands 
to receptors) is still a black art for scientists, with 
little reliable results to show for 30yrs of work.

Joe

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant map
generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!