On 2/28/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Toby Donaldson</b> <<a href="mailto:tjd@sfu.ca">tjd@sfu.ca</a>> wrote:<div><span class="gmail_quote"></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br> 1. The broken interaction between Idle and the turtle package.<br><br> 2. Poor documentation. To actually understand certain function<br>calls, it was necessary to read the turtle.py source code.</blockquote><div>
<br>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).
<br><br>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".<br><br>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
<br><br>Kirby<br><br></div></div>