last time on "[EMAIL PROTECTED]": we had meeting 1 done, it went ok, with ~20 pupils. there were too many slides, and the 2nd "live demonstration" was found to be a bit over-complicated to perform.
today's episode "2 for the money, 3 for the flaw": on the 2nd meeting (which was a tools learning one, with linux file commands and jed), there were 10 pupils (9 kids and one teacher). there were more dropouts then i expected, but it's ok. they managed to cover the tools, and the 2 teachers (our two tel-hai college students) found that it was very tirying going among the kids. eventually, it was summarized as "ok". they had to cut off on a few things due to lack of time. slides are not yet on the web site - i'll put them after i edit them. on the 3rd meeting (which was the first one to actually touch python), we only had 4 pupils. after waiting we found the rest didn't drop - they just had a big math exam the next day, were kept for extra lessons in school without prior warning... so we went ahead with 4 kids. we managed to teach the material as written in the slides, but had to skip the 'nested while loops' exaple (i think it's too early to introduce it here - a single while loop proved hard enough). what i found was that asking the kids to make mental leaps at this stage was a bad idea. i also saw that showing examples that don't do anything useful puzzles the kids. finally, having an endless loop in putty via windows XP got the putty window completely stuck, and windows working slowly, and forced me to kill putty via the task-manager - a wasted 30 seconds, which is _a lot_ in our time frame, and which distracts the kids attention completely. i should update the slides so that we'll demo doing a simple while loop that counts from 1 to 5, and then ask the kids to do variations on this loop - count to 10, count in reverse, count only even numbers (2, 4, 6...). these variations proved mentally-challenging enough for the kids. this sunday, ariella and asaf (our tel-hai students) will give the 4th meeting, together with a re-run of meeting 3 for the kids that missed it - so i hope we'll be back in sync for the 5th meeting. notes about mini-slides - help with writing them is still needed. amit aronovich has written the slides for meeting 3 and is working on another meeting now, and i'm doing the rest so far. note that if you vulanteer for this, you must: 1. use the same format and formatting program we arleady use. 2. be prepared to be commented to death - i have no mercy, and i emphasize very specific points that might seem trivial or not important to you. i do this, since eventually i'll have to face the results of badly written slides. patience is required, as well as christian forgiveness ;) -- guy "For world domination - press 1, or dial 0, and please hold, for the creator." -- nob o. dy
