Hi Andre,
I would really like some advice based on practical experience teaching beginners.
I personally would stick with Idle. There was a time, when it was problematic under MacOS because tkinter was missing there - but those days are over.
As an all-platform, _already (battery-) included_ editor, Idle is simple but pretty good. There is not much you have to explain which concerns the ide.
Most of the problems of beginners in Idle (and I always use idle in class, apart from reeborg) are not very idle-specific (indentation, copy and paste in console-mode, miximg tabs and spaces, saving, importing).
You will have to explain the difference between programming at the prompt or in a file, but you would have to explain similar things in other ide's as well.
If you want to keep it safe and simple, write programs with Idle only in files (File->New File, and run them with F5). Most technical problems arise when using the live-prompt (session-saving is useless).
Some students used idle and pygame together some years ago with no problems.
1. Use IDLE. Free, part of the standard distribution. I never used it very much myself and I keep reading about how tricky it can be to set up properly for beginners - mostly, I gathered, due to path problems on Windows. There is a proposal to make it better ( https://github.com/asweigart/idle-reimagined/wiki) but it is doubtful it will be realized soon enough (or at all) to make it worthwhile waiting for it.
I haven't encountered path problems with idle recently (about since the introduction of Windows XP and python msi-installers ...)
When Pygame is installed Python has got to find it, but that shouldn't be a concern of Idle.
Having to install only two things (check for the python dependency of the pygame-version first!) would be my choice.
Cheers, Christian _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
