[Edu-sig] Recommendation for editor+console or IDE for teaching beginners

[Christian Mascher]

Hi Andre,


> I would really like some advice based on practical experience teaching
> beginners.
>

I personally would  stick with Idle. There was a time, when it was 
problematic under MacOS  because tkinter was missing there - but those 
days are over.

As an all-platform, _already (battery-) included_ editor, Idle is simple 
but pretty good. There is not much you have to explain which concerns 
the ide.

Most of the problems of beginners in Idle (and I always use idle in 
class, apart from reeborg) are not very idle-specific (indentation, copy 
and paste in console-mode, miximg tabs and spaces, saving, importing).

You will have to explain the difference between programming at the 
prompt or in a file, but you would have to explain similar things in 
other ide's as well.

If you want to keep it safe and simple, write programs with Idle only in 
files (File->New File, and run them with F5). Most technical problems 
arise when using the live-prompt (session-saving is useless).

Some students used idle and pygame together some years ago with no problems.



>
> 1. Use IDLE.  Free, part of the standard distribution.  I never used it
> very much myself and I keep reading about how tricky it can be to set up
> properly for beginners - mostly, I gathered, due to path problems on
> Windows.   There is a proposal to make it better (
> https://github.com/asweigart/idle-reimagined/wiki) but it is doubtful it
> will be realized soon enough (or at all) to make it worthwhile waiting for
> it.
>

I haven't encountered path problems with idle recently (about since the 
introduction of Windows XP and python msi-installers ...)

When Pygame is installed Python has got to find it, but that shouldn't 
be a concern of Idle.

Having to install only two things (check for the python dependency of 
the pygame-version first!) would be my choice.

Cheers,

Christian