whoops, sent this reply off-list by accident (apologies to Scott) ----
Here's a thought that just jumped into my mind, I don't know if it has any value, but bear me out: I think it probably makes most sense to introduce programming to totally new people in a procedural/structured/whatever you want to call it way. My feeling is that most people who haven't done any programming think of a computer program as a big list of instructions for what to do, and this model should be pretty easy to introduce to them. Now you start to try to do more compliated things, and you have to start accumulating global state so that your many functions can do meaningful things without having to pass loads of arguments around. Pretty soon, depending on the topic, you probably want a way to group global variables together -- the first approach might be to name them similarly, like foo_bar and foo_baz for bar and baz relating to foo. But what if you have two different things of type foo? Now introduce objects as essentially structs. You have a class definition, like: class Foo: bar = someDefault baz = someDefault and just work with that for a while. Now, you are passing around Foo's as arguments to your functions, and you realize that certain functions can only work on Foo's, while others can only work on OtherThing's. Isn't it logical to group your functions in the same way as your variables? Oh, look, thats object-orientation (or the core of it), and you got there all on your own. My experience as a student has been that the best teachers are the ones who give you all but the conclusion, and let you make the final leap yourself. That, I think, makes the knowledge both more likely to stick, and the excercise (which is probably at least somewhat artificial, as most exercies tend to be) more exciting, as you feel like you're making a new contribution to how it all works. Anyway, that's roughly how I had been introduced to OO programming over the years: first BASIC, learning the, well, basics, of program organization with sub's; next, larger scale programs, maybe in C, organizing static members and functions into files; soon structs; then full-on OO with Java (which I loathe), and later Python and C++. Just my $0.02 dsc _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
