Hi Dave -- I had some home schoolers in that age group. One activity that proved popular with "madlibs" which is where you have this canned paragraph with blanks in place of some adjectives, nouns, verbs (you're likely familiar with the genre -- the story is usually pretty zany). Example: http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/sa6299/madlib1.py (note, the text is from a published madlibs book, credit given). I found kids enjoyed this activity, which came after a fair amount of shell activity around substitution, which happened after we'd introduced the dictionary as a data structure, e.g.:
thewords = {'noun1':'house', 'noun2':'mouse'} print "In this %(noun1)s there lives a %(noun2)s." % thewords In this house there lives a mouse.
Once these concepts and syntax are clear, then I think it's OK to work with pre-programmed code, i.e. I didn't make them write the simple loop that gathered their word choices and stuffed them in a dictionary. But we did go over said code. As with human language learning, it's easier to read grammatical code than it is to speak or write it (because so much of the work is already done). I then used a lot of this same substitution technology to write scene description language for POV-Ray. The kids also enjoyed using POV-Ray directly, without mediation by Python. Typical code: http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/pytools/povray.py A prerequisite here is some appreciation for XYZ coordinates. I got lucky. My home schooling students already knew all about that stuff. Some of this stuff at my web site was done with older kids (high school) so if you poke around, you'll see material that's obviously too advanced for 9-12 year olds. What really slows kids down is an inability to keyboard at all efficiently -- hunt and peck, with a lot of hunting. Typing skills remain as important as always. A prime motivator to increase speed these days is IM and IRC, but sometimes kids this young don't have a peer group that uses these typing-intensive interfaces. Kirby
-----Original Message----- From: edu-sig-bounces@python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces@python.org] On Behalf Of dave@lakegregoryics.com Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 10:13 PM To: edu-sig@python.org Subject: [Edu-sig] Elementary School Instruction
Has anyone here had experience teaching Python to Elementary School children 9 to 12 years of age? This kids are part of a gifted students elective program (upwards of 120 students) in the area where I live. I am in the planning stages of a 3 part series (18 weeks) covering beginning Python and would appreciate hearing about any experience and/or advice you might have.
Thanks,
Dave Lanham LGICS
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