Re: [Edu-sig] CS0 course
Andre Roberge wrote: Does anyone have experience with teaching a CS0 course structured like this? Are you aware of any resources that I could use, mostly in terms of assignments idea? (note: they have to be either in French, or things that are short enough that I could translate them without having to invest too much time) Thanks for your time reading this message, and I welcome any suggestion you may have. Check in newsgroup fr.comp.lang.python. It is fairly active (nowhere near comp.lang.python), but I'm certain there are resources. -- -- Scott David Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
Re: [Edu-sig] CS0 course
On 6/30/07, Scott David Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andre Roberge wrote: Does anyone have experience with teaching a CS0 course structured like this? Are you aware of any resources that I could use, mostly in terms of assignments idea? (note: they have to be either in French, or things that are short enough that I could translate them without having to invest too much time) Thanks for your time reading this message, and I welcome any suggestion you may have. Check in newsgroup fr.comp.lang.python. It is fairly active (nowhere near comp.lang.python), but I'm certain there are resources. -- Thanks for the suggestion; I have been perusing fr.com.lang.python occasionally and should probably ask a similar question there. However, I am also well aware that the French education system is very different than the North American one. The Canadian and American education, while fairly different one from another, can be considered nearly identical when compared with the French system. French students generally have a much more rigorous mathematical background at a given age; the educational approach/style is very much formal rather than informal. Also, there seems to be a lot more early specialization - so I don't think that courses like CS0 are very likely to exist within the French system. However, I will check... André -- Scott David Daniels [EMAIL PROTECTED] ___ 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
Re: [Edu-sig] CS0 course
However, I am also well aware that the French education system is very different than the North American one. The Canadian and American education, while fairly different one from another, can be considered nearly identical when compared with the French system. French students generally have a much more rigorous mathematical background at a given age; the educational approach/style is very much formal rather than informal. Also, there seems to be a lot more early specialization - so I don't think that courses like CS0 are very likely to exist within the French system. However, I will check... André Lots of moving targets in this picture. Given your idyllic circumstances, I'd think you'd want to customize and localize around your geographical context and expected student demographics, right down to the screen saver and local web server level. Plone has ways to customize all the menus and interface controls per whatever language. How about an inhouse Plone site, with CS0 spending at least a few hours dissecting it, in terms of MVC and the underlying Zope machinery. Zope is very big in Europe, I can say from personal experience. If you were a larger research university, I'd think developing Python bindings to some French-English phrase book database and translation service, ala Google's, would become a part of your infrastructure. Maybe such bindings already exist, in the sense of Python hacks (e.g. xml-rpc translate this into French requests to the server farm in The Dalles). As a curriculum writer, I have to assume increasing familiarity with Python among the pre-college set, at least in some parts of North America. CS0 will be easier if the ambient culture gets back on the track we were on with BASIC, per that Salon article 'Why Johnny Can't Code'. But a good CS0 has ways of not penalizing those who're just sampling. There're always more languages, or one could do that leveling the playing field thing and do it all in Scheme for a couple weeks, then switching to Python. This idea of immersion works well for computer languages, not just human ones (at least for students in the good at languages category -- which it sounds like your school attracts). Anyway, the challenges would be much the same in any language I would think. It's more finding the writers who'll commit to doing the work. Kirby ___ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
Re: [Edu-sig] More OLPC chatter
On Jun 29, 2007, at 6:29 PM, kirby urner wrote: One way around this shortcoming of Sugar's is to suggest that once kids are mature enough to eyeball the kind of convoluted source code Yes, and we tend to think that's not the right way. Adults need to focus on stable developer environments like Wing's or whatever (or like IDLE for starters). So at your bat mitzvah or other ceremony, you maybe trade in your much loved OLPC XO (and your teddy bear), and move up to something more expensive, with a more traditional source code treatment (anyone ready for C yet?). Is there a reason you think you can't happily run a normal editor, compiler and shell on an XO? You seem to be strangely conflating software that's shipped with the XO by default with both its hardware and the limits of purposes for which it can be used. -- Ivan Krstić [EMAIL PROTECTED] | GPG: 0x147C722D ___ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
