[Edu-sig] IDE for GUI development in Python

[kirby urner]

2008/8/11 Matt K <matt.kameron at gmail.com>:
> Thanks for all the suggestions!
> Here are the responses (from both mailing lists):

<< SNIP >>

> Kirby - What level do you teach? I'm teaching Year 11 students and my goal
> is certainly not for students to be competent at programming GUIs. My goal
> is for them to be competent at the basics: loops, data structures etc. I'm
> hiding many things from them including classes - although we do use classes
> we use them as no more than a C struct (since this is in line with the
> secondary school curriculum). Occasionally we need to deviate from this but
> this is vary rare. The need for GUI is because we are coding a real world
> problem which requires a GUI. Hence I am after something that is quick and
> simple, and I don't mind if they come out saying "I really understand
> programming although I don't really get how the GUI linked in."

Hi Matt.

My students have tended to be pre-college and have not been that GUI
focused, though we've done some, mostly I tell a lot of stories around
how GUIs came to be, in contrast to command line, what's a widget.

We might just play with one widget, like a pull down, maybe in a web
browser though, the control having been written and populated by
server-side Python.

An example with some widgets might be
http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/geoquiz.html which is also about CGI
and SQL.

I make no effort to sync with the ambient high school curriculum, but
rather work backwards from what I think is a very usable set of
concepts and skills, try to redesign the curriculum for the 21st
century vs. the 19th (yeah, we had to skip one to catch up).

This is easier for me because I'm not beholden to layers of
administrators who believe the status quo is acceptable.

I also have been known to download wxPython and project the demo (easy
to flip to source code for each example).

Maybe show Jython (I also talk a lot about how Tk itself is a widgets
library, ported across systems, and since we're using IDLE much of the
time, we're already in a working GUI, one that includes a shell or
interactive front end).

I'm moving to a new business model where I'll use my Ubuntu laptop
more, am especially interested in PDF generation using such as PyCairo
and ReportLab, working with adults (many of them faculty of this or
that institution).

Kirby