Hi everyone,

I'm working on planning my Python course for this fall, and I'd

the group's advise on when I should introduce OOP. I work with Zope a lot and the OO paradigm is pretty deeply embedded there. I've really gotten to like it. (Not that I've mastered it. :-)

Now I'm fully aware that Python is just as capable a procedural

language as it is an OO one. I don't want to skip talking about

Hi Tim, I just completed teaching a 15 hour little survey course on Python at the community college here in Eugene. It went pretty well, particuarly since it was the first time for me with this material. I tried to make the course sort of data-oriented. Concentrated on first simple data types, numbers and strings and then moved on to lists and dictionaries. Treated the rest of the language as just operators on the data, so introduced "for" along with lists, etc. We mostly played with small pieces of code, often at the interactive prompt. Near the end I introduced 2 larger programs. The first was strictly procedural, a tic-tac-toe that showed off functional decomposition pretty well. That was last week. In the last 3 hour class this week we first looked at object oriented stuff and then showed an OOP simulated card game. This game will be a chapter in the OBP book real soon now. People seemed to have no problem with OOP this early. Some of it might be that they were already used to composite data with lists and dictionaries. Including things like nested lists etc. So objects referencing other objects was ok. Tying methods to objects, no problem. Inheritance a little trickier but still ok. My impression is that the two programs were about the same in complexity and size. But my students had to struggle more with the procedural one. There were a lot more smiles this week than last. I think maybe it's all about being able to map the code to a model in your head. As Kirby said, you still got to use procedural code to stuff into the object methods. I vote for using OOP as early as you can and have them use it if they are writting programs. Set good habits early. Chris Meyers 07/27/2001 8:21:27 PM, Timothy Wilson <wilson@visi.com> wrote: like to get programming that side of

things, but OOP seems so prevalent in many areas that I'd like to get my students working with it as soon as possible.

I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have on this topic.

-Tim

-- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.org | http://www.zope.com W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org wilson@visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com

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