<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Here are the reviews of the Teaching with Grace abstract that I submitted. The abstract is sitting in the svn repository in GracePapers/SNAPL.<div class=""><br class=""><div class="">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; "><div class="">Kim</div><div class=""><br class=""></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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<div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">Begin forwarded message:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">Date: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">February 20, 2015 at 10:35:00 AM PST<br class=""></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">From: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">SNAPL 2015 <<a href="mailto:snapl2015@easychair.org" class="">snapl2015@easychair.org</a>><br class=""></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">To: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class="">Kim Bruce <<a href="mailto:kim@cs.pomona.edu" class="">kim@cs.pomona.edu</a>><br class=""></span></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;" class=""><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 1.0);" class=""><b class="">Subject: </b></span><span style="font-family: -webkit-system-font, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, sans-serif;" class=""><b class="">SNAPL 2015: reviews for paper 31: Teaching with Grace (Abstract)</b><br class=""></span></div><br class=""><div class="">Dear Kim: I apologize for my earlier snafu. Below you should find your reviews.<br class=""><br class="">Shriram<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------------------- REVIEW 1 ---------------------<br class="">PAPER: 31<br class="">TITLE: Teaching with Grace (Abstract)<br class="">AUTHORS: Kim Bruce<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------- REVIEW -----------<br class="">The author has created a simple OO programming language (Grace) for teaching introductory programming courses and reports on preliminary experience. I very much like the idea of<br class="">creating a simplified PL designed for novices, especially in this day and age where <br class="">"everyone should learn to program". I think that the author will get good discussion<br class="">going on this important topic.<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------------------- REVIEW 2 ---------------------<br class="">PAPER: 31<br class="">TITLE: Teaching with Grace (Abstract)<br class="">AUTHORS: Kim Bruce<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------- REVIEW -----------<br class="">It is hard to think of how to evaluate a 1-page abstract. But the<br class="">topic is certainly very interesting, the presenter is exciting,<br class="">the abstract is well-written, and generally I think it will be<br class="">a welcome short presentation at the conference. <br class=""><br class="">Specifics:<br class="">-I am a little surprised that there is little emphasis on the fact<br class=""> that the current implementation does not fully support static type<br class=""> checking! I think there could be interesting insights there on<br class=""> the use of static typing in a first CS course.<br class=""><br class="">-Similarly, I am not entirely convinced that it's a great thing to<br class=""> have students not install anything on their computers but do all<br class=""> their programming in a browser. Programming is hard. People who are<br class=""> not comfortable with basic *usage* of a computer (i.e., installing<br class=""> programs) stand no chance. It is a huge effort in my department to<br class=""> impress upon freshmen that if they haven't even installed the tools<br class=""> on a computer they control (and instead do all homework in the lab or<br class=""> in pairs, on another student's computer) they will certainly fail!<br class=""><br class=""> In any case, it is intriguing. I would love to see our students not<br class=""> get distracted by anything else, in a controlled environment, but I<br class=""> do wonder if this will make them learn programming more easily. It's<br class=""> a more general pedagogical question and may also have to do with the<br class=""> students' age. For instance, for young children and for natural<br class=""> (foreign) language learning, an environment without natural<br class=""> distractions and overhead of a different culture is believed to be<br class=""> worse than naturally picking up a language in an environment full of<br class=""> distractions (i.e., the things that people who speak the foreign<br class=""> language do and which have nothing to do with language learning).<br class=""> I'm certainly not an expert, so I'm only wondering aloud.<br class=""><br class="">-"By 10 weeks into the course we were 1 week ahead of the Java-based<br class=""> sections of the course." This seems like an extremely minor difference,<br class=""> especially given the possibility of confirmation bias. The observer<br class=""> expected a difference, right? The followup "student performances ...<br class=""> on the midterm and labs were at least as strong ... even th*r*ough<br class=""> we moved at an accelerated pace" also seems very weak.<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------------------- REVIEW 3 ---------------------<br class="">PAPER: 31<br class="">TITLE: Teaching with Grace (Abstract)<br class="">AUTHORS: Kim Bruce<br class=""><br class=""><br class="">----------- REVIEW -----------<br class="">This is a two page summary on an experimental version of an introductory programming course at Pomona that uses Grace. The premise is that the simplicity of Grace will make it a better teaching language that Java and the summary mentions some preliminary (non scientific) evidence of the fact. I think a discussion of what is a good introductory teaching language would be a great discussion to have at SNAPL, and therefore support this paper given that it will present one point of view---especially if we have other papers on the topic with opposing views.<br class=""><br class=""></div></blockquote></div><br class=""></div></body></html>