Karel the Robot Comes to Yorktown...

Hi All, Every year something terrific comes out of Yorktown High School's participation in the Python Conference. This year was even better than the previous two, since it was near enough to us that thirteen of our students could attend. We learned a lot and met many interesting people, and the students left the conference turned on to programming. The highlight of this year's conference for us has to be Michele Moore's tutorial, "Graphical Interface Programming in Python". Ironically, it wasn't until months after the conference that I realized just how important it was. Ten of my thirteen students took it upon themselves to attend the tutorial, which opened my eyes as to just how much they wanted to learn to do GUI programming (up to that point not a part of the 1st year program). The tutorial was way over their heads, but moved by my students evident interest in the subject I talked to Michele after her presentation and asked her if she would be interested in helping some of my students learn Python GUI programming. And did she ever help! First, she came to one of our Linux Users Group meetings and gave a presentation right at the student's level of understanding. Then she mentored several of our students to the point that they are becoming quite adept. The most telling result of these efforts is the release of a Python implementation of Karel the Robot, with a graphical interface written in wxPython by Yorktown student programmers Donald Oellerich and Wassem Daher. This project would not have been finished on time (and I should add, under budget ;-) if it were not for Michele's generous help. The Project now has a sourceforge site at: http://pykarel.sourceforge.net The Python community continues to amaze me with it's generosity and eagerness to help, and provides a reason every bit as important as the many merits of the language itself for using Python to introduce students to programming. jeff elkner yorktown high school arlington, va

I've long wondered whether unicode would give rise to more programming languages moving away from the Roman alphabet. With Python, this appears to be happening. Kirby ============== http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=185103 ChinesePython is a translation of Python scripting language itself into chinese. Not only the variable names, user messages/warnings/prompts but most notably, the reserved keywords and builtin types. 3.14 changes: * more translated messages * standardize names * modified string/unicode string hash method * modified function names * fix bugs

Kirby Urner <urnerk@qwest.net>:
I've long wondered whether unicode would give rise to more programming languages moving away from the Roman alphabet. With Python, this appears to be happening.
Sounds like we'd soon need a Transliteration-Nanny for having at least an idea about the Chinese ("red snake"?) standard library to come... or even import it! ;-) Dinu
participants (3)
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Dinu Gherman
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Jeffrey Elkner
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Kirby Urner