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

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I like the command line and a text editor myself. Just set the file properties to executable and add the #!/usr/bin/python path to the top of each executable. Idle and VIdle are very usable too. Of course, I'm using Linux.
HTH,
A. Jorge Garcia
http://shadowfaxrant.blogspot.com 


Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE smartphone


-------- Original message --------
From: roberto <roberto03 at gmail.com> 
Date: 12/10/2014  1:14 PM  (GMT-05:00) 
To: "edu-sig at python.org" <Edu-sig at python.org> 
Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] Recommendation for editor+console or IDE for teaching	beginners 

Why don't you try cloud.sagemath.com? or https://trinket.io/

They both let your students work at a distance and collaborate with you.
Hope this helps.

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 4:47 PM, Christian Mascher <christian.mascher at gmx.de> wrote:

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
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-- 
Roberto
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