<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">SO: Any recommendations as to course textbooks? Or just go with Zelle<br>and/or O'Reilly's latest wood rat book?
<br>- The students presumably have had programming courses already.<br>- I would think that K-12 students would be happier if they could<br>generate some graphics.<br>- This is a 6-weeks course. Little leisure time.
<br><br>Appreciate any advice.<br><br>Peter Chase<br>Sul Ross State University</blockquote><div><br>I still like Zelle's best and includes some graphics (Tk-based, using his own graphics.py). <br><br>Some of the online tutorials are quite worthwhile as well:
<br><a href="http://diveintopython.org/">http://diveintopython.org/</a> is freely downloadable.<br></div></div><br>Or roll your own (that's what I've been doing).<br><br>Another way to get graphics is to write scene description language (POV-Ray) or even VRML from Python. I've used this approach successfully, but only because I give students access to prewritten modules. Like, we might build our own vector class, with a module that already expects to use vectors.
<br><br>VPython is still more graphically exciting.<br><br>If you're teaching people who're going to be in turn teaching Python, then I think the job is more to showcase what's possible, often in demo mode. Give a sense of the possibilities. Mastery of all these options needn't be the goal of the course. I'd focus on enough mastery of basic core Python to leave students with a sense of "hey, this ain't so hard, I could really be productive with this!"
<br><br>Kirby<br><br>