[Edu-sig] Mentoring experiences

[Kirby Urner]

So I met with my 3rd grader this afternoon.
 
He was happy to have finally gotten Fedora running on a donated ThinkPad.  

He suggested I add IDLE to the Gnome taskbar, which I did -- he had no
problem following.

We hooked the ThinkPad to a classroom projector while booting a few Windows
machines (2000 and 98) into IDLE.  As other students dropped in, we did a
quick impromptu intro to Python.  Use it as a calculator, write a basic
function.

The word of the week at this school is:
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis

def added(word):
    return word + 'ed'

def maketitle(phrase):
    return phrase.title()

The first function added 'ed' to the end, which didn't make a lot of sense
with this word as input, but oh well.  Better to use verbs.

We only had a few minutes today.  I quickly showed how to save these as .py
files for later.

And the 8th grader and I have been corresponding by email a bit.  He's
learned enough Python to figure out some Roman Catholic holy days.

Kirby