[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[kirby urner]

On 7/6/07, Andre Roberge <andre.roberge at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Note that non-classroom teaching (like Kirby does for
> motivated kids) does not count!
>
> Where is Jeff Elkner when we need him?.... ;-)
>
> André




Well boo hoo, why doesn't my stuff count?  It's a real classroom
with real computers and real middle to early high schoolers,
plus I did two sets of eight weeks (once per week) with two
sets of 8th graders at a public school, meaning all the 8th
graders in the place, "motivated" or not.

Admittedly, that's not my regular gig.  Mostly my students sign
up and participate voluntarily.  But then, most schools teach
computer programming as an elective, unlike the way I suggest,
as integral with regular mathematics (teach functions interactively
in the shell, later saving and importing, like Laura said, instead
of using a stupid calculator).

Plus some years back I was hired to teach home schoolers,
average age 13, at Free Geek...

As I mention in my slides for EuroPython (looking forward to
meeting Laura again tomorrow), Madlibs proved appealing
to most students, little stories where they have to prompt
themselves (since raw_input seems to be a theme here,
though interacting with the shell and having no main loop
at all is just as possible, I'd say better at first...)

Possible to use %s substitution but string module has these
nifty Template as in:

sillystory = string.Template("""
There once was a certain $persons_name from $city
who had a pet $animal.  One day, the $animal ate all
the food in the house and $persons_name was very
angry.
"""

# let's fill a dictionary!
thedict = {"persons_name":"",
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