FW: the Scratch conference was great!

[http://dummy.us.eu.org/robert (Robert)]

 > From: http://www.cs..edu/~bh
 > Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2017 01:06:38 -0700
 >
 > The conference in Bordeaux was wonderful.  The only problem was that I
 > never convinced my dinner companions to go for a 300-Euro bottle of
 > St. Emilion Premier Cru.  And it was too hectic; it wasn't until yesterday
 > that I managed to find time to shower, despite the extreme heat most days
 > (except for the one day with the enormous thunderstorm).
 > 
 > The conference was in three locations, all conveniently located on the
 > Tram B.  Except that the week of the conference they scheduled some huge
 > repair project that made half a dozen tram stops in the middle unreachable.
 > They had a shuttle bus to replace the tram, but for reasons I will never
 > understand, you had to walk all the way from the temporary end of the tram
 > line to where the next stop was supposed to be, which doesn't sound like the
 > end of the world, but I'm an old man with chronic leg pains, and it was about
 > 200 degrees out.
 > 
 > The opening reception was in a science museum, luckily in the direction that
 > was still reachable by tram.  Several scheduled speakers were sick and had to
 > cancel at the last minute, so I ended up giving a hastily-prepared talk.
 > Joek, who organized all this, told me to touch on the 10th anniversary of
 > Scratch and the 50th anniversary of Logo.  First problem: I couldn't find my
 > power adapter, so I borrowed Cynthia's.  Second problem: I could have sworn I
 > had an HDMI adapter for my Powerbook, but it turns out I had anything but.  So
 > there was a delay while someone dug up a VGA cable.  Eventually I got set up,
 > and fired up  Logo, which isn't 50 years old but is much like Logos
 > from back then (one triangular turtle, for example; textscreen vs. fullscreen
 > vs. splitscreen).  I reminded them that we had really slow computers and no
 > internet, so we couldn't do the fancy graphics and the social network of
 > Scratch.  But what we /did/ have was the ability to write procedures,
 > including recursive functions, and to make lists of lists straightforwardly.
 > I did Vee in Logo, then talked about why you can't do it in Scratch.  I then
 > characterized Snap! as being an effort to bring back to Scratch everything we
 > could do in Logo.  And then showed Vee in Snap!, as usual first presenting it
 > as if they were students, and then pointing out that on the stage we have a
 > list of blocks, and we don't say a word about lists of blocks in the lesson,
 > but kids know what a list looks like, and they know what a block looks like,
 > so it's perfectly obvious to them what they're looking at, even though they've
 > never seen procedure-as-data before, because in this case the picture really
 > is worth 1000 words.
 > 
 > Anyway, people seemed to like it; even Cynthia didn't complain about anything
 > I said. :-)