> i currently am attempting (and slightly failing) to teach a small(5) > group of children (ages 8-14) > python programing out of a creative commons book found here: > http://pythonbook.coffeeghost.net/book1/
Great! I learned basic from very similar programs way back... > unfourtanatly i am having trouble trying to explain why (rembember the > mind set at that age) they need to know the basics. any hints, > suggestions and/or comments is appreciated.(what notes i have are > posted on my website). I remember having to actually type in basic programs from a Rainbow magazine into my Tandy Color Computer. Having to get each character right before the program ran correctly was a rewarding challenge. I could type in and run programs that I didn't understand, and in the process see what made them go, and eventually look up everything that I had to in order to understand why it worked. At that point, I could change little things, and see if the behavior of the program changed the way I expected. (I still do that today!) One of the best instructors that I ever TA-ed for was a guy named Otto Berkes (he's now at Microsoft, and is one of two or three guys who created the X Box.) He was teaching x86 assembly, and he had a really fantastic teaching style... he provided 99% of a fun solution, and the students had to fill in the last 1% for a rewarding result. (it was an animation viewer, and the last 1% was the RLE decoder for the Autodesk-specific video format.) He gave very specific instructions for the hard parts, (how to link your code with what he provided.) The last 1% was enough of a challenge to really engage the students, (and frustrate about 20% of them.) I think that if you started off with Reversi from the book, but intentionally broke something like how the reversing works, they would see that they have to figure out the code to make it work correctly, and that curiosity would make them hungry to learn the basics. If they had an environment where PyGame was already installed, the http://www.pyweek.org/ challenges would give some really nice examples that were even more engaging, and the students could do things like make the character in the side-scroller jump higher than originally intended, or some other modification along those lines. I think the trick is to gloss over the basics as long as possible... and before long they'll be asking you the "why" questions that indicate their brain is ready to absorb. -Jim
