<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/6/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Andre Roberge</b> <<a href="mailto:andre.roberge@gmail.com">andre.roberge@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>Note that non-classroom teaching (like Kirby does for<br>motivated kids) does not count!<br><br>Where is Jeff Elkner when we need him?.... ;-)<br><br>André</blockquote><div><br><br><br>Well boo hoo, why doesn't my stuff count? It's a real classroom
<br>with real computers and real middle to early high schoolers, <br>plus I did two sets of eight weeks (once per week) with two <br>sets of 8th graders at a public school, meaning all the 8th <br>graders in the place, "motivated" or not.
<br><br>Admittedly, that's not my regular gig. Mostly my students sign<br>up and participate voluntarily. But then, most schools teach <br>computer programming as an elective, unlike the way I suggest,<br>as integral with regular mathematics (teach functions interactively
<br>in the shell, later saving and importing, like Laura said, instead <br>of using a stupid calculator).<br><br>Plus some years back I was hired to teach home schoolers, <br>average age 13, at Free Geek...<br><br>As I mention in my slides for EuroPython (looking forward to
<br>meeting Laura again tomorrow), Madlibs proved appealing <br>to most students, little stories where they have to prompt<br>themselves (since raw_input seems to be a theme here, <br>though interacting with the shell and having no main loop
<br>at all is just as possible, I'd say better at first...)<br><br>Possible to use %s substitution but string module has these<br>nifty Template as in:<br><br>sillystory = string.Template("""<br>There once was a certain $persons_name from $city
<br>who had a pet $animal. One day, the $animal ate all <br>the food in the house and $persons_name was very <br>angry.<br>"""<br><br># let's fill a dictionary!<br>thedict = {"persons_name":"",
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