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Making things practical, and packaged, is the key to getting them in the classroom. Give a teacher a program that meets the level of her students, and a lesson plan that goes with the software, together with a teaching guide, and if it works, it will be adopted. Give them building blocks they have to put together themselves, and adoption will be spotty.
Hank -- the preceding is fascinating. Can you be more specific? ******** Steve, when a teacher teaches in a classroom, everything is laid out in a lesson plan. That lesson plan references curriculum objectives, details methods, etc. It's a lot of work to develop these. Typically, it takes until the 3rd year for an experienced teacher moving to a new grade level to have it all down to a comfortable level. The general curriculum demands come from the State, but generally fall into line with curriculum standards that are essentially national: if California and Texas adopt a textbook, e.g., the rest of the states will likely end up using that book, because that's what the publishers will offer (and the associated curriculum materials will be available for those books, etc.). Nothing will happen in this (programming) initiative in the classroom unless these materials are made available to the teachers. To create a new curriculum for a single subject at the local level typically involves a team of 5 teachers meeting half-days for several weeks during the summer (if not much more, depending on the degree of sea-change). Not that they don't like this work (it's a way to make some money during the summer and still be able to golf and fish <s>), but the school districts have to fund it, the teachers have to have the background in the area which in this case would involve additional training, etc. But if they are presented with the materials ready to go, and a few web-based workshops can teach them how to use the materials, then the chance of adoption shoots up. That brings one to the issue of what they need. The best educational software involves teacher and class: Tom Snyder Productions specializes in this kind of software, e.g. It's a whole area of expertise which is outside of the ken of anyone I've seen represented on this list, including myself. Then there is the 1- or 2-person software, with which we're more familiar (but it's still not our field of expertise), needed for triangulating the previously learned material. I think we're in a position to give some limited input; but getting it to happen will involve educational curriculum specialists, educational software designers, and Python users. Our input will need to be elicited into usable form by the educational curriculum specialists, specifically those with an orientation toward cognitive development; then put into curriculum form by those curriculum specialists who are classroom oriented. Then put into educational software by the ed. software designers, coordinated with teaching materials, lesson plans, and test materials geared to curriculum standards. It's a daunting task. The danger I see in this list is that one always tends to see other people's jobs as being easy, not requiring special expertise. I would no more tell a classroom teacher how to teach a subject than I would let a classroom teacher tell me how to design a database, or subclass an object. thanks for asking <s>, Hank