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Hi Andrew,
I would have a look at RUR-PLE, at Livewires, and
also the book Python Programming for the Absolute Beginner by Michael
Dawson.
RUR-PLE is great for a little while, it's a little
robot on the screen that can be programmed to move around mazes and so
forth using a very limited set of instructions. It's quite an eye-opener
to kids to see how a few simple constructs can lead to all kinds of unexpected
behavior. Go to http://rur-ple.sourceforge.net/
I think that the Livewires stuff (http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/pyBiblio/livewires/course/)
is a good follow-on to RUR-PLE. It's very well organized as a Python
module built on top of pygame plus a set of instructional material and
game-oriented challenges. I found that even these simple challenges are
too hard for my kids (15 and 16 years old) to understand without a lot of
additional hand-holding.
Beware of assuming that things that are obvious to
those of us who are experienced programmers are going to be obvious to kids
who've never programmed at all. The idea
that someone with no previous exposure will find Python "readable" seems pretty
optimistic to me -- I'm sure there are kids like that but I haven't had any in
my classes. Something as trivial as
for val in
range(10,0,-1):
print val
print "Blastoff!"
is not self-explanatory to normal
people!
We're about to start a Python club of our own here
at my school, perhaps we can trade notes, maybe have our kids email one
another? A bunch of the kids here are excited by the prospect of a
regional programming competition for high-schoolers at New Jersey Institute of
Technology (http://cs.njit.edu/contest/) It's
limited to Java and C++ this year but they said they'd consider expanding that
list for next year. . .
Regards,
Andy Judkis
Academy of Allied Health and Science
Neptune, NJ
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