Hi Bryce! What I do first is assign small exercises from each chapter, and then assign a big project. I am using Tim's projects this year, and that has been a *BIG* help. (this collaboration thing is really working! ;-) Not all of the chapters in the text book have enough exercises, which is something I hope will be able to remedy in the next few weeks. There are two very good reasons for doing bigger projects: 1. The ability to write meaningful programs should be a primary teaching goal. Academic programs have often come under criticism by industry for not preparing students for "real world" programming. There is a natural tendancy in academia to focus on small examples that make the concept transparent without confusing learners with extraneous details. The problem is students come away with no understanding of the software development process itself. Their learning doesn't scale up to bigger problems. This is also the motivation for the case study now used in the Advanced Placeement program. 2. Big projects are Cool! My experience is that students like them because they solve more interesting problems. Tim is doing a great job of picking projects that my students enjoy doing (thanks again, Tim!) jeff elkner yorktown high school arlington, va On Thu, 2001-11-29 at 12:30, Bryce Embry wrote:

Howdy, I'm in my first year of teaching computer programming in Python and am developing my material based on the How To Think Like A Computer Scientists book at www.ibiblio.org/obp. I have to confess that I fell into teaching computer programming without any formal training, and I'm learning a lot of the material as we go along (I'm a few steps ahead of the students, but not far).

Looking through some of the edu_sig posts, and Timothy Wilson's page at http://www.isd197.org/sibley/cs/icp/, I'm seeing that assigning students a large project seems to be more popular than assigning a number of smaller, more pedantic problems. What is the rationale behind the larger projects as opposed to smaller projects? What are the benefits and drawbacks of asking students to spend a week on one large project instead of that same week on three or four smaller tasks, then giving a large task once a month or so? I've been using what I consider to be smaller projects (my stuff is at http://www.bembry.org/tech/python/index.shtml ) and am wondering if fewer, larger projects would be better for my kids.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bryce Embry --- Geek of All Trades, Master of None --- Margolin Hebrew Academy --- 390 South White Station --- Memphis, TN 38117 --- (901) 682-2409

Hello again, Bryce! I just took a look at your site and it looks nice! I would like to ask two favors: 1. Can we list you on the list of schools page? http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/pyBiblio/schools.php If that is okay, please send a paragram describing your school/program to Lex Berezhny: lex@berezhny.net 2. Can I put your exercises/nots on the pyBiblio site as well? My hope is that by leveraging the sharing and collaboration made possible by free content and the web we can both enhance student learning and reduce our work load at the same time. I put more hours than I can remember into working on the text book (it was fun), but I'm glad now that Tim is writing up interesting projects, so I don't have to do that. The more materials we can get on the site the easier it will be for other teachers to use Python. Thanks! jeff elkner yorktown high school arlington, va On Thu, 2001-11-29 at 12:30, Bryce Embry wrote:

(my stuff is at http://www.bembry.org/tech/python/index.shtml )

Bryce Embry --- Geek of All Trades, Master of None --- Margolin Hebrew Academy --- 390 South White Station --- Memphis, TN 38117 --- (901) 682-2409