Yup,<br><br>I'm a student at the Erasmus High School in Brussels.<br>In about 1 year I'm going to graduate as a teacher in mathematics, history and informatics. <br>I 'll give math and history to children between 12 and 15 years old and informatics to those between 14 and 18(+) years old.
<br><br>This is the Belgian model ... informatics just starts in the third year of secondary schools. It's a course of 1 or 2 hours (~50 minutes) a week. The emphasis is on Microsoft office packets Word, some Excel and a little Access, ... programming happens in Pascal (most of the times), a language I personally despise, and the pupils need to know a little about networking, the www (some html), new thingy 's, ... and some other bits.
<br>#Q1: What model does your country use?<br><br>Before I graduate, I, of course, have to write a graduation paper (~correct term?).<br>Now, I fell madly in love with Python. So I want to write my paper about teaching Python in secondary schools ... I'm thinking about a textbook from the third year up until the last year, teaching basic concepts using this beautiful language. On top of that I'm also a great fan of Free Software and Open Source ...
<br><br>My favorite sources for Python are:<br>* How to Think Like a Computer Scientist, Learning in Python<br>* Dive Into Python<br>* The Livewires Python Course<br><br>#Q2: What should a graduated student (18y) need to know or, perhaps better, where should I stop?
<br>Which books are recommended?<br>--- Values, Types, Expressions, Statements, Operations, Procedures, Functions<br>--- Strings, Lists, Dictionaries, Tuples<br>--- Logics and Conditionals<br>--- Loops, Recursion, Iteration
<br>--- Classes and Objects, methods and attributes, Inheritance, Overloading<br>--- ADT: Stacks and Queues, Trees, Linked lists<br>Getting blurry now ...<br>--- Files, Pickle, Error Handling<br>--- Sockets, Server, Client
<br>--- ???<br>--- Using a database<br>--- CGI<br>--- HTTP, html, xml handling<br>--- GUI programming<br>--- ???<br><br>#Q3: If I copy-paste the GPL and GFDL into (respectively) the examples and my textbook, is that enough to make it Free (as in Freedom)? Or do I have to register somewhere?
<br><br>Motivation is important. The students need to see and feel the use of programming.<br>For instance, making a pacman-game (Livewires) will give students enough motivation.<br>Or making a little script to rename all photos from some holiday ...
<br>Or making a small and raw server-client chat program ... <br>Or a simple webserver in Python and then go from there to set up your own WAMP/LAMP.<br><br>#Q4: What little chores did you solve using Python? <br>What would interest you as a 14-18 year old?
<br>When did you think like "Man, if I only knew how to start solving this problem... how does this works?"<br><br>I know these are some big questions, but I hope you can help me out of your own experiences ...<br>
<br>Regards,<br>Sven<br>