Warren, Your book looks great! I'd be interested in seeing the rest of it. Yeah, we ended up discussing how to represent a deck of cards in class as well. One of the kids got inspired while creating the dice simulation and emailed me asking how to do something like that. So I was really glad to see this start growing organically. We haven't discussed classes previously, as that would REALLY have scared them off, so I just had him continue at the level of simple lists, thinking of cards as simple ordered pairs:
>>> suits = ['S', 'H', 'D', 'C'] >>> ranks = ['A', 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 'J', 'Q', 'K'] >>> deck = [(rank, suit) for suit in suits for rank in ranks] >>> shuffle(deck) >>> hand = [deck.pop() for card in range(5)] He played around with this and really got into it. Good news! It's amazing how much you can do in a simple interactive way with Python. I mean, this LOOKS like what you do with a deck! But I did try to sow some seeds by mentioning how you could accomplish even more by thinking in terms of functions and classes. - Michel On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 9:21 AM, Warren Sande <warren.sa...@rogers.com>wrote: > Michel, > > Sounds like you caught their interest, which is great. I have a chapter on > probability and simulation in my book, "Hello World! Computer Programming > for Kids and Other Beginners". It talks about simulating dice, coins, and a > deck of cards. In the second half of the chapter we make a Crazy Eights > card game (text-based). I've attached a preview of the chapter if you want > to have a look. Keep in mind that this is one of the later chapters, and we > have already covered the basics like loops, lists, objects, etc. > > By the way, the book has had some delays in production, but it should be > out in the next few weeks. > > Regards, > Warren Sande > > > ------------------------------ > *From:* michel paul <mpaul...@gmail.com> > *To:* "edu-sig@python.org" <edu-sig@python.org> > *Sent:* Thursday, February 5, 2009 1:34:49 PM > *Subject:* [Edu-sig] probability & simulation > > We began a unit in math called 'Probability and Simulation'. The students > of course have to solve many typical problems involving dice and coins. > This provided a perfect opportunity for incorporating Python in a way that > didn't freak the kids out. Remember, I have been trying to weave Python > into a math environment where programming is seen as something alien and > scary. Bizarre. The 'choice' function in the random library provides an > excellent way to create all kinds of simulations very easily. I used this > as an example in class: > > >>> coin = ['Heads - I win', 'Tails - you lose'] > > >>> tosses = [choice(coin) for toss in range(1000)] > > It was great. Very easy to understand. This combined with the 'count' > method in a list, and I could go ahead and assign them a little HW project > to create a frequency table for throwing 2 dice 10,000 times. I told them > to just experiment, copy and paste their Shell session and email it to me. > It worked very well. Even a lot of the kids who have been resistant to this > Python stuff could handle it. Didn't require having to write functions - > purely interactive. > > Then the next day we explored tetrahedral and other kinds of dice. > > Very simple, and it seemed to work well. There's a section at the end of > the chapter that describes creating simulations using BASIC. Ha! We did > this on the very first day! > > - Michel >
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
