[Edu-sig] More from Portland

[kirby urner]

I've found younger kids especially (13ish) like the Madlib motif, i.e.
fill-in-the-blanks stories.

In today's lesson @ Winterhaven, I had kids enter the code below, helped
with debugging (I had about 30, each with a Win2000 box), then suggested
they come up with more imaginative stories of their own (by changing the
code).

One student was quite creative with the dictionary keys, putting in things
like 'Noun ending in er' (the keys double as prompts in raw_input).

On another front, Winterhaven is happy enough with how this beta is going,
and gave me a Moodle account to develop local teaching materials.  This will
assist in the process of spreading Python to other public schools in the
area.

Plus sometimes we have kids author content, e.g. some of the Moodle-based
HTML teaching is actually done by students.

The worksheet that went with the code below also got into the 'if __name__
== '__main__': option, for when you want to run at the command line, or in
IDLE simply by pressing F5.  Until today, we've always imported everything
in the IDLE shell.

Per my blog entry of earlier today, Oregon is launching some new education
initiatives.  My Oregon Curriculum Network is well positioned to make some
of our dreams come true (plus I'm pretty good at frustrating some of the
nightmares others-who-shall-remain-nameless  might find it convenient to
capitalize on).

Kirby


"""
Worksheet:  substituting strings
"""

story = """
Once upon a time, deep in an ancient jungle,
there lived a %(animal)s.  This %(animal)s
liked to eat %(food)s, but the jungle had
very little %(food)s to offer.  One day, an
explorer found the %(animal)s and discovered
it liked %(food)s.  The explorer took the
%(animal)s back to %(city)s, where it could
eat as much %(food)s as it wanted.  However,
the %(animal)s became homesick, so the
explorer brought it back to the jungle,
leaving a large supply of %(food)s.

The End
"""

thewords = ['animal', 'food', 'city']
userpicks = {}

def tellstory():
    """
    loop through thewords and get user choices in a dictionary
    named userpicks, then substitute userpicks into the story
    """
    for word in thewords:
        userpicks[word] = raw_input("Enter a value for %s: " % word)
    print story % userpicks
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