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October 2015

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12 discussions

Re: [Edu-sig] Research on best language to use for teaching beginners
by Andrew Harrington Oct. 2, 2015

Oct. 2, 2015

Good point on order of keyword introduction affecting ease. I agree with yours, though having introduced functions first allows me to show how to use return to short-circuit a loop without having to add the extra syntax of break so early. Dr. Andrew N. Harrington Computer Science Department Graduate Program Director gpd(a)cs.luc.edu Loyola University Chicago 529 Lewis Towers, 111 E. Pearson St. (Downtown) 417 Cudahy Science Hall (Rogers Park campus) http://www.cs.luc.edu/~anh Phone: 312-915-7982 Fax: 312-915-7998 aharrin(a)luc.edu (as professor, not gpd role) On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 11:33 AM, Laura Creighton <lac(a)openend.se> wrote: > I have found that if you begin teaching: > > for item in lst: > > and > > for letter in word: > > and then add break, and continue, > > and then teach > > for x in range(y): > > and then teach > > while (something): > > it all goes better than if you begin with while loops. > > But I don't know whether this means this is a better order to teach in, > or simply a better order for _me_ to teach in. > > Laura > > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > Edu-sig(a)python.org > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig >

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Research on best language to use for teaching beginners
by Andre Roberge Oct. 2, 2015

Oct. 2, 2015

Hi everyone, Google has failed me, and I'm hoping that someone on this list could help... About a year or two ago, I read a study comparing different programming languages used for beginners. I believe there were at least four different languages that had been looked at, one of which was Python. I also believe that the (main) author including their newly created language as comparison. As I recall, the author looked at the reading comprehension (and writing ability?) demonstrated by the students for basic programming structures. One thing that jumped at me was that one of the structures used by Python (likely the for loop) was not very understood by the students. I'd appreciate if anyone could turn the above poor description into an actual link to the actual article I'm attempting to describe! ;-) André

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