
hi, i have the opportunity to teach python at the local public school and my company will pay for my time off of work to volunteer. i talked to the school and i can set the curriculum and the age of the students how i want. the grades available to me are K-12. my question to this email list is does anyone have a curriculum that i could borrow from. i need to put together a syllabus and plan for 18 1 hour sessions. i'm thinking about setting minimum requirement to those that have taken at least 1 quarter of algebra. if you think that's not the right thing to do please let me know. thanks, bryan

A lot of the Python-first stuff out there is aimed at the college level, where opportunities like the yours are more common than at the high school level. You may wish to take into account whether this is part of the curriculum or a voluntary after-school activity. In the latter case, it's crucial to have the meetings enjoyable and rewarding every time so as not to have too much attrition. Graphics is certainly valuable in offering a psychological reward. One place to look is certainly Jeff Elkner's material at http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/ A quicker path to graphics is offered by http://www.livewires.org.uk/python/ ; there are some installation issues you'll have to work out with the school. Thanks to a recent casual mention on this list, I have been looking at Scratch for my next effort in this direction. Scratch is not a full-fledged computer language but has some very remarkable features as a transition from software user to software creator. It is easy to install, and offers an upload to the web, so kids can ship their projects home. I think a few sessions with Scratch may pave the way for a more successful Python experience. Good luck and stay in touch! mt On 7/22/07, Bryan <belred@gmail.com> wrote:
hi,
i have the opportunity to teach python at the local public school and my company will pay for my time off of work to volunteer. i talked to the school and i can set the curriculum and the age of the students how i want. the grades available to me are K-12. my question to this email list is does anyone have a curriculum that i could borrow from. i need to put together a syllabus and plan for 18 1 hour sessions. i'm thinking about setting minimum requirement to those that have taken at least 1 quarter of algebra. if you think that's not the right thing to do please let me know.
thanks,
bryan _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig

Using algebra as a basis for teaching programming is great. I've used it at times as a lead-in: you basically use the same terminology (functions), and kids really like being able to replace the actual calculations with a function that can be 'worked out' by the computer. You could also approach it from a variety of different directions. GUI programming is possible, but with the class I am working with now I wish I'd had more chance to spend teaching other stuff before having to move to a GUI toolkit. Matt. On 23/07/07, Bryan <belred@gmail.com> wrote:
hi,
i have the opportunity to teach python at the local public school and my company will pay for my time off of work to volunteer. i talked to the school and i can set the curriculum and the age of the students how i want. the grades available to me are K-12. my question to this email list is does anyone have a curriculum that i could borrow from. i need to put together a syllabus and plan for 18 1 hour sessions. i'm thinking about setting minimum requirement to those that have taken at least 1 quarter of algebra. if you think that's not the right thing to do please let me know.
thanks,
bryan _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Matthew Schinckel <matt@schinckel.net> The Feynman Problem-Solving Algorithm: (1) write down the problem; (2) think very hard; (3) write down the answer.
participants (3)
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Bryan
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Matthew Schinckel
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Michael Tobis