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
I still like Zelle's best and includes some graphics (Tk-based, using his own graphics.py).
Some of the online tutorials are quite worthwhile as well:
http://diveintopython.org/ is freely downloadable.
Or roll your own (that's what I've been doing).
Another way to get graphics is to write scene description language (POV-Ray) or even VRML from Python. I've used this approach successfully, but only because I give students access to prewritten modules. Like, we might build our own vector class, with a module that already expects to use vectors.
VPython is still more graphically exciting.
If you're teaching people who're going to be in turn teaching Python, then I think the job is more to showcase what's possible, often in demo mode. Give a sense of the possibilities. Mastery of all these options needn't be the goal of the course. I'd focus on enough mastery of basic core Python to leave students with a sense of "hey, this ain't so hard, I could really be productive with this!"
Kirby
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