Karel the Robot vs. Scratch

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today NCLab was presented to a computer science instructor at Coral Academy (CA) in Reno. CA is an exemplary high school for math, science, and engineering. The instructor liked it a lot and specifically he said that Karel the Robot was much better than Scratch (another programming language for beginners). One concrete advantage of Karel over Scratch (besides not requiring any installation, benefiting from the whole NCLab framework, and the usual arguments) is that students can smoothly transition to Python. This is not easy with Scratch. Of course, having Python in NCLab as well keeps things very simple. And he was amazed by Solid Modeling. WebGL worked smoothly on their computers. Coral Academy is going to adopt NCLab for programming courses starting with Fall 2012. I will help the instructor redesign the course myself, and the new course will be called “Introduction to Programming with NCLab”.