{"id":605,"date":"2010-12-05T16:08:43","date_gmt":"2010-12-06T00:08:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/?p=605"},"modified":"2010-12-05T16:08:43","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T00:08:43","slug":"basic-was-for-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/basic-was-for-everyone\/","title":{"rendered":"BASIC was designed for students"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not sure when I put\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/bits.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/12\/21\/computer-science-education-its-not-shop-class\/\">this article<\/a> about CS education reform into my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.instapaper.com\/\">Instapaper<\/a>, but I learned something new:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In the early 1960s, the professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed BASIC (Beginner\u2019s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth College because they thought educated people, and future leaders of America, should have some first-hand experience with computing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I like this precedent of developing tools for students first, and business markets later. Focusing on students (and particularly &#8220;100-level&#8221; classes) is a great motivation to keep things simple and easy to learn. When\/if the technology eventually gets powerful enough to compete with other tools, it will win because real people might actually want to use it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not sure when I put\u00a0this article about CS education reform into my Instapaper, but I learned something new: In the early 1960s, the professors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed BASIC (Beginner\u2019s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth College because they thought educated people, and future leaders of America, should have some first-hand experience &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/basic-was-for-everyone\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;BASIC was designed for students&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,8,9,11],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=605"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/605\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=605"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=605"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robinstewart.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=605"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}