[Edu-sig] The fate of raw_input() in Python 3000

[Arthur]

Peter Bowyer wrote:

>The teaching material 
>did not link everything together so that at the end of the 10 week 
>course you had a large application which you'd built on every 
>week.  Instead you had a pile of useless scripts all totally separate 
>giving no idea that software you could write might be useful rather 
>than just boring.
>  
>
This would be my feeling as well.

But "useless" scripts is all it is realistic to expect to write early on.

And there is competition out there.

Writing useless scripts or reading great contemporary literature.  Hmmm??  

Given the choice, another potential CS student bites the dust.

I can imagine an introductory course that was in fact more a *reading* 
course than a writing course - that spent a good deal of its time 
analyzing the code of  relatively straightforward, but interesting, 
working applications.  The satellite view, before we attempt to descend 
to a finer resolution.

Perhaps it's my educational background.  When John was making the 
analogy between an introductory CS curriculum and an English curriculum 
he said to the effect that it was unrealistic to expect to turn everyone 
into a Shakespeare.  But the fact is that creating writers *at all* is 
outside the scope of the typical English curriculum - it is attempting 
to create great *readers*.. 

I/O.  Read/write.  Seems to me the typical introductory CS course is 
quite unbalanced in this respect.

My instincts are strong enough on this point that I am working to 
provide a satellite view exegesis of the PyGeo code as part of the 
application itself, seeing the ability to read the PyGeo code central to 
fulfilling its purpose - i.e. unless a student can read the code well 
enough to at least extract the analytics driving the visible synthetic 
geometry, PyGeo cannot hope to fulfill its ambitions of tying these 
approaches to geometric study together in more effective ways - ways 
that could not be adequately achieved without the use of computer 
technology - which is the area where I think the use of computer 
technology should be hanging out, educationally.

See "Pygeo as an Introduction to Programming".

http://pygeo.sourceforge.net/docs/Overview.html#pygeo-as-an-introduction-to-programming

Art .