[Edu-sig] Python at grades 5-9 summer program

[Dave Briccetti]

Hi all. I'm pleased that I've finally discovered what a great resource 
Edu-sig is. I've read selected
threads back to December and I'm very impressed with the people here.

I met Guido van Rossum at this talk back in Oct 2003:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/031029.html

I told Guido I would be teaching Python to kids in Summer 2004, and he 
suggested I come here. I
think I took a quick peek, but it wasn't really until tonight that I've 
spent a few hours and gotten to
know some of you through your postings.

I've been a professional programmer since 1978, and a self-employed 
consultant since 1983. These
days I work mostly in Java on Linux, Windows, and MacOS X. In the 
summers I teach for six
weeks at a community college program for grades 5-9 in Pleasant Hill, 
California (not far from San
Francisco). Over the years I've taught QBASIC, Visual Basic, C++, and 
Java. Several years ago I
started attending open-to-the-public lectures at Stanford and PARC, such 
as this talk by Alan Kay:

http://hci.stanford.edu/cs547/abstracts/02-03/030425-kay.html

The more I heard brilliant computer scientists such as Kay talk, the 
more convinced I became that
teaching kids Visual Basic was not a good thing. (By the way, there's a 
funny line from Kay in the
video of that talk. He's lamenting the current state of affairs in 
computer science at universities. He
says, "And here I sit in the oxymoronically-named 'Gates Computer 
Science' Building....") An IBM
researcher friend of mine suggested I teach Python as a beginner 
language and so last summer I did.
And it was a huge success! Next week I start teaching it for Summer 2005.

A few weeks ago I got an email from an adult who is a friend of a 
student who will be in my Python
class this year. The man works in industry, and wanted to know why I 
would teach Python and not
Visual C++. He said he was "revolted" by the idea, or something like 
that. I was annoyed, but
politely responded that I thought Python was a better language for 
teaching beginners, is free, is
cross platform; that I wasn't a factory for the next generation of 
Microsoft programmers, etc. He
persisted, suggesting that I'm some tired old professor who was just 
teaching what he knows
instead of something useful. At this point I withdrew from the 
conversation, with the funny saying
coming to mind: "Never try to teach a pig to sing...." Anyway, after 
spending the last several hours
reading your posts here, I'm ever so convinced that I'm doing the right 
thing for these kids.

I look forward to getting to know many of you, and becoming a better 
teacher for it. Perhaps I'll
have some ideas to share with you.

Dave Briccetti
Dave Briccetti Software Consulting, Lafayette, California
www.davebsoft.com, http://davebsoft.com/cfk/
Diablo Valley College, College for Kids Program
http://www.dvc.edu/college4kids/