[Edu-sig] Interactive Tkinter graphics under IDLE

[Peter Drake]

It's not that I'm going to do procedural first and objects later. The  
vast majority of these students will never take another programming  
class. There is also a significant level of math phobia in this  
course, so anything I can do to make it less complicated is a win.  
Indeed, they spent the first couple of weeks with LEGO robots...

I was under the impression that Python was trying to be  
"multiparadigm", so you could program in a procedural, OO, or  
functional style. This doesn't seem to bear out for any but the  
simplest programs, but I'm hoping I can pretend it's procedural for CS0.

Peter Drake
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Lewis & Clark College
http://www.lclark.edu/~drake/


On Feb 6, 2007, at 4:58 PM, kirby urner wrote:

> On 2/6/07, Peter Drake <drake at lclark.edu> wrote: I'm planning to  
> keep things at a very low level throughout the
> course. These students aren't ever going to be writing programs more
> than ten or twenty lines long, so all of the OO machinery is
> unnecessarily confusing. (I am, of course, not trying to start any
> kind of paradigm war here; I'm just explaining where I'm coming from.)
>
> I confess to being overtly suspicious of any programming course
> using Python that doesn't dive in to OO.  Seems a waste of a good
> opportunity to enlighten students as to the state of the art, even if
> they're not planning to become programmers.  Indeed, some of the
> simplest programs one might want to write in Python involve
> subclassing something from the standard library and overwriting
> a few methods.
>
> But this isn't to heap criticism on your CS0 in particular.  I've seen
> any number of CS departments doing this ontogeny recapitulates
> phylogeny thing, slogging through procedural code for an entire
> semester, before unveiling OO in a second year.  I explicitly inveigh
> against that practice in my aforementioned screencast "classes
> and subclasses".  But then, I have a different demographic.  My
> students are learning mathematics, and need operator overloading
> from the get go.  How else to implement Vectors in a satisfying
> manner, other than by implementing __add__ and/or __mul__?
>
> Kirby
>