Kirby, I am confident you are dealing with a different population with different interests and skills. Some of my students are taking the course because they are math-averse, and Loyola allows the survey of computing as a fulfillment of a math requirement in business and liberal arts curricula INSTEAD of a conventional math course.
I am much more interested in teaching this crowd abstraction, rigor, and orthogonality than exponents and mantissas. I have already rocked their boats trying to explain twos complement. I promise you these people do not need to know what a float is and how it differs from a mathematical real, that on the whole they are not equipped to understand it, and that it would be a bad idea to explain it. Generalizing from this, I suspect a big part of what makes teaching Python such a quandary is that it is so accessible. (As with many of its problems, c.f. "too many web frameworks", this is symptomatic of the language's strengths, but that doesn't mean it isn't a problem) There are diverse audiences that might be exposed, and that in turn makes a uniform curriculum problematic. mt _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
