[Edu-sig] Edu-sig Digest, Vol 31, Issue 16

[kirby urner]

On 2/28/06, Toby Donaldson <tjd at sfu.ca> wrote:
>
>
>    1. The broken interaction between Idle and the turtle package.
>
>    2. Poor documentation. To actually understand certain function
> calls, it was necessary to read the turtle.py source code.


My tentative conclusion, reading the above, and from some personal
experience, is the Tkinter turtle.py, while a fun demo, is mostly a toy and
should not be used for serious teaching, at least on Windows.  Too much
adverse experience.  Too much frustration.  In general, Tk on Windows has a
lot of problems -- I generally forsake IDLE and go to a command window, for
good reason.  IPython is an alternative (a good one -- once you get it
working in Windows, which is very doable).

I really don't think *any* kind of turtle graphics is essential to learning
programming, although as I said, I think the approach is very viable and
destined to last.  I'm not "anti turtle".

My own special interest is in going back to the very early days of Logo,
when a physical robot was used.  I'd rather have hardware robots than screen
based ones, with Python bindings.  SONY should seed me a prototype :-D

Kirby
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