Dan Meyer on math, Alan Kay on physics, and the Pharo tutorial
Dan Meyer has a nice TED talk about math pedagogy:
I find it very similar to Alan Kay's TED talk where he shows off various Smalltalk things to illustrate physics concepts:
The best introductory programming book I have ever seen (and I've seen a lot in many languages) is Squeak: Learn Programming with Robots, which many people might recognize as a very LOGO like introduction.
Along with that, I was quite intrigued with Pharo's introduction to Smalltalk. This world has a tutorial class. When you first open the world (which is just double-clicking the icon of the single file you downloaded), the big window tells you exactly what to do first then leads you through a 24 step tutorial of the entire language and some of the tools:
Pharo tutorial from brian d foy on Vimeo.
If you haven't run into Smalltalk before, its world is what many other languages strive to be but ignore. Smalltalk is where the idea of a refactoring browser started, and what a lot of people want for Perl. I think a lot of the work going into Padre is really an attempt to force a Smalltalk-like world on Perl. I even tried to make my own Perl system browser, which I've now put it on Github although I don't use it anymore.
I'm the author of Mastering Perl, and the co-author of Learning Perl (6th Edition), Intermediate Perl, Programming Perl (4th Edition) and Effective Perl Programming (2nd Edition).
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