Hi Chris! I too work for a newspaper - The Free Lance-Star - in Fredericksburg, Virginia (www.fredericksburg.com). We are using Zope mixed with Python, XML and SQL to handle the automated production of our paper online. Working out very well and having a great time with Zope! Made our jobs a lot easier. Would love to hear of anything you can offer for teaching Python. We are Zopeheads here and some are more versed in Python than others...only using it for things we need to for interactiion in Zope. Trying to get a curriculum for teaching younger students (8-14) for our home schooling computer classes. Allen Schmidt aschmidt@fredericksburg.com -----Original Message----- From: Chris Meyers To: edu-sig@python.org Sent: 5/24/2001 9:40 PM Subject: [Edu-sig] Python for Fun Hi, I would like to introduce myself and offer my first posting to the group. My name is Chris Meyers and I've been working with Jeff Elkner and his Python class at Yorktown High School on the Open Book Project. I'm working primarily on Python case studies for intermediate students. The first 4 (of hopefully a dozen) can be found at www.ibiblio.org/cmeyers. These programs are some of my favorites from many years of programming. They are all short, just a page or two but should demonstrate good use of recursion and objects with algorithms that are a little beyond the ordinary. You will be led to a writeup that should explain the code in detail. These 1st 4 are Logic Circuits. Simulation of logic gates with object classes that make good use of inheritance. This study starts with AND, OR, NOT gates and builds up to a four-bit binary adder. Several students are extending this study at Yorktown. Lisp in Python. A study of the classic evalquote mechanism. We end up with an interactive lisp similar to interactive python. Tower of Hanoi. A reworking of the standard algoritm to use objects sending messages. Includes a classroom exercise where students play the objects User Input. An extension of raw_input and input functions to provide a scripting mechanism. Used by Lisp in Python to load files. I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years, and have used a lot of languages. I work at the daily newspaper in Eugene Oregon, the Register Guard. I found Python about 5 years ago and tried it on a text processing project and it worked so well we've never looked back. Now 8 people program with it daily, and it is absolutely the language of choice for all new projects. The production of our internet newspaper is automated with Python code to the extent that it requires only about 1.5 hours a day for someone to produce. You can see it at www.registerguard.com. We are converting all of our old systems on VAX computers to Unix using Python and SQL. 2 years ago we converted our circulation system from Cobol to a combination of VB, Python, and SQL. The amount of code was reduced a factor of six, the system runs well, changes are easy, everyone is happy. On a personal note, I've really grown to love this language (Thanks Guido!!) Lots of reasons, but you all know them and I would be just preaching to the choir. Assuming we get enough students (and I'm getting a lot of interest) I'll be teaching a beginning Python class at our community college this summer. It's short, only 15 hours. But it will be mostly adults and should be interesting to see how far we get. Thanks, Chris _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig