GVU Technical Report Number:
GIT-GVU-00-17
Title:
Using Squeak for Teaching User Interface Software
Authors:
Mark Guzdial
Abstract:
Squeak is a new programming language based on an old one that skipped
some 15 years of development. Squeak is highly cross-platform,
running on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, BeOS, and Windows CE devices
(among others) bit-identically. It has been updated with modern
features, such as web browsing and serving, 3-D graphics engine, and
powerful sound synthesis. Squeak is an excellent pedagogical
platform because it doesn't presume a windowing operating system.
Instead, Squeak implements all of the windowing and other user
interface software itself, providing both a rich set of examples and
a bare substrate on which one can explore and build user interfaces
from scratch. We have used Squeak both to enhance the infrastructure
for our course, and to change how we teach user interfaces. We
present a pilot study suggesting benefits of the new approach.
Keywords:
User interface software, education, Squeak, collaborative learning
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