[starlogo-users] Re: sandboxed starlogo

[kevin mcgee]

> Eric Klopfer wrote:
>
> Within the next month or two we will be releasing a "preview"
> version of an entirely new StarLogo - rewritten from the ground up
> with new ideas in mind. 
>
>  One of the features that we plan for this version is "sandboxing"
> different versions of the language with subsets of commands.  This
> idea is part of "dr. scheme", a version of scheme designed to
> introduce students to programming.

as someone who uses dr. scheme to teach university-level courses in
scheme, i have a comment that might be helpful as the starlogo team
works on this idea of sandboxing command-sets as special-purpose
languages. 

one of the frustrations with dr. scheme is that it "hard codes" its
assumptions about a particular "good progression" (from beginner to
advanced) in its choices of primitives for the different "teaching
language sets".  we have not yet had the time/resources to do so, but
one of our plans at some point is either to implement our own series
of language-levels for dr. scheme -- or even a more general-purpose
ability for users to quickly identify some collection of primitives
and simply name and save the set so it can be selected from the
"select language."

since starlogo has a wide community of different kinds of users, it's
this last idea that may be the most useful for starlogo. it could be
nice to make it easy for users to create their own sandbox-sets.

cheers,

kevin