You may want to teach J first, in addition, or instead. http://www.jsoftware.com/
Also FREE. J is the creation of Turing Award winner Ken Iverson and his colleague Roger Hui. "J is a modern, high-level, general-purpose, high-performance programming language. J is portable and runs on Windows, Unix, Mac, and PocketPC handhelds, both as a GUI and in a console. True 64-bit J systems are available for XP64 or Linux64, on AMD64 or Intel EM64T platforms. J systems can be installed and distributed for free." Examples: 5 + 5 10 ADD =. + 5 ADD 5 10 +/ 3 4 5 8 12 45 77 ADDtheseNumbers =. +/ ADDtheseNumbers 3 4 5 8 12 45 77 2 + 5 6 7 7 8 9 i. 6 0 1 2 3 4 5 power =: ^ x power 2 x =. 3 4 5 6 x power 2 9 16 25 36 2 power x 8 16 32 64 J comes with many tutorial labs as part of the IDE. J processes vectors and arrays with ease. J forums have many J'ers willing to guide. regards, gerry "If your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems tend to look like nails". (author unknown) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Chase" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <edu-sig@python.org> Sent: Friday, February 24, 2006 3:29 PM Subject: [Edu-sig] Textbooks I'm teaching some prospective K-12 teachers this summer and propose to introduce them to Python. Reasons are numerous - It's the least weird language I know. - It offers so many programming styles. - And not least, it's free SO: Any recommendations as to course textbooks? Or just go with Zelle and/or O'Reilly's latest wood rat book? - The students presumably have had programming courses already. - I would think that K-12 students would be happier if they could generate some graphics. - This is a 6-weeks course. Little leisure time. Appreciate any advice. Peter Chase Sul Ross State University _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
