Sent this already, but since it hadn't gone through yet, figured I'd sign up for idle-dev and resend an edited version :) The moderate can feel free to delete the original, less clear emails if so inclined.
Hi all, there are some useful ideas that might be worth adopting from an IDE for Scheme - 'DrRacket', which is used to teach programming design. https://class.coursera.org/programdesign-001/class The most interesting idea is that it highlights any code that wasn't executed during a unit/doctest. So a developer/student can easily spot deadcode or code that needs to have test cases created. An idea that seeing this feature inspired (due to at first mistaking the purpose of the feature) was to add the arrows showing program flow as used in LLVM with Clang static debugging. So the user can trace through visually how the program is executing. Other useful features of the language/IDE for teaching purposes were having the file editor and evaluation window in single frame. This is easier for many individuals than moving the file editor window to the foreground, then the evaluation window to the foreground and likely reduces 'context switching' mental overhead. Also something fairly unique, but quite interesting for simplifying teaching tasks, is the abilty to paste images into a variable definition, and able to output images to the evaluation window. i thought this was rather clever, pasting an actual image inline into your program file rather than path manipulation is likely drastically easier for new users, and visual results are both more interesting and often easier to understand. Along with the image pasting into variable definitons was the inclusion of a simple image manipulation library that allowed simple operations - enough to create toy games, and animations. To me this is more kid friendly and appealing than turtle. Perhaps turtle could be extended to include the functions provided or a seperate module. It allows for simple examples that are likely more readily graspable for beginners. Ie one of the early examples in the course is a stoplight and turning the 3 colors off and on. Have a look at these videos for the course 8 minutes onward in 01d 3:50 onward in 01e https://class.coursera.org/programdesign-001/wiki/view?page=AllLectures (might require free registration to view the videos) Thanks for your great work, hope you find these suggestions of interest. Tom M. _______________________________________________ IDLE-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev
