As I pointed out in my message, the reason we use turtle graphics is to introduce the idea of functional decomposition and bottom-up development. I have little interest in graphics, personally.
It worked very well for our students, and the fact that turtle graphics is a toy is important: there's less anxiety playing with toys. I see many, many students who have zero experience with programming in high school, and exhibit more anxiety in the first-programming course than in a math course (which at they least have a decade of experience with, even if they dislike the topic). Toby On 2/28/06, kirby urner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2/28/06, Toby Donaldson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > 1. The broken interaction between Idle and the turtle package. > > > > 2. Poor documentation. To actually understand certain function > > calls, it was necessary to read the turtle.py source code. > > My tentative conclusion, reading the above, and from some personal > experience, is the Tkinter turtle.py, while a fun demo, is mostly a toy and > should not be used for serious teaching, at least on Windows. Too much > adverse experience. Too much frustration. In general, Tk on Windows has a > lot of problems -- I generally forsake IDLE and go to a command window, for > good reason. IPython is an alternative (a good one -- once you get it > working in Windows, which is very doable). > > I really don't think *any* kind of turtle graphics is essential to learning > programming, although as I said, I think the approach is very viable and > destined to last. I'm not "anti turtle". > > My own special interest is in going back to the very early days of Logo, > when a physical robot was used. I'd rather have hardware robots than screen > based ones, with Python bindings. SONY should seed me a prototype :-D > > Kirby > > -- Dr. Toby Donaldson School of Computing Science Simon Fraser University (Surrey) _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
