I approach this by introducing the for-loop initially as a way to work through a list. Those of us brought up on the numerical for-loop in C or early Java think that iterating a list is "advanced", but free of these preconceptions, children find it natural to write:

>>> mylist = [2,3,"bang!"]

>>> for thing in mylist:

        print(3*thing)

Then range() can be introduced as "a smart way to make a list of numbers", which I demonstrate with list(range(10)) to avoid a discussion of lazy iteration.

Jeff Allen

On 13/07/2016 06:19, Jurgis Pralgauskis wrote:

When I try to teach Python to young kids,
the big obstacle is describing repetitions in simple way (esp. for turtle graphics).

for a in range(4):

....

More py-zen would be

repeat 4:

....

I know some py-edu-environments have their hacks:

https://codecombat.com/ has "loop" instead "while True"

http://reeborg.ca/reeborg.html has the "repeat n"

Also "repeat n" is used in Blockly and Scratch

Also scientific math env has kind of hack for "range(a, b+1)" -- just "[a..b]" (like in CoffeScript):

http://sagemath.wikispaces.com/Counters

***My ideas, how to implement this***

- IDE (plugin) translates "repeat" to "for.." on run,

on errors it could translate stuff back to hide any mention of "for.." :)

or after translation could leave a comment that it has been translated from "repeat"

- PEP for even more edu-friendly Python: "py-zero" (with possibly more stuff)? :)

--

Jurgis Pralgauskis
tel: 8-616 77613;
Don't worry, be happy and make things better ;)
http://galvosukykla.lt
_______________________________________________
Pythonedu-wg mailing list
Pythonedu-wg@python.org
https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pythonedu-wg