[Idle-dev] IDLE in UK Schools

[Bruce Sherwood]

Guido, the use of IDLE isn't limited to precollege. The Matter &
Interactions curriculum and textbook developed by Ruth Chabay and me (
matterandinteractions.org) is for first-year university science and
engineering students. Unlike most intro physics courses and textbooks,
which take a 19th century perspective and stop around 1865, we offer a
contemporary perspective on intro physics. One of the contemporary aspects
is a serious introduction to computational modeling, and the language is
Python. The great majority of these first-year technical students have
never written a program before, and the clarity and simplicity of Python is
crucial to being able to have the students model physical systems
computationally. Matter & Interactions is used at a number of major
universities that include NCSU, Purdue, Georgia Tech, and U Texas Austin,
and at many four-year liberal arts colleges that include Wellesley,
Haverford, Union, Carleton, and St. Olaf.

Students in this curriculum use the VPython module (vpython.org) to
visualize system behavior in 3D. In the last 12 months there were 70,000
downloads of VPython, many of which were surely by university students
using Matter & Interactions. They use IDLE, in a slightly modified version
(called VIDLE for clarity). In a crowded physics course we are constrained
to teach a very small but sufficient subset of Python, and teaching a
sophisticated editing environment is absolutely out of the question, nor is
it necessary. Python and IDLE are key to what we do.

Steve Spicklemire and I are the current developers and maintainers of
VPython, and I do all of my Python programming very happily in (V)IDLE, so
its utility is not limited to beginners. (I use Eclipse for C++ and
JavaScript project work.)

Bruce Sherwood

P.S. I'm also the developer of a version of VPython that runs in a browser (
glowscript.org), thanks to the RapydScript Python-to-JavaScript compiler
(plus some preprocessing to implement the VPython API), which does an
adequate job for the typical uses to which VPython is put. There is a third
version of VPython called ivisual, a pure Python implementation by John
Coady for the IPython environment, in which the 3D rendering in the IPython
notebook is done by invoking the GlowScript graphics libraries, which are
based on WebGL. A fourth variant of VPython is offered by trinket.io, which
bundles the GlowScript VPython compiler and execution into a package that
one can place on one's own web page.

At glowscript.org you can run a sizable number of VPython examples, and
this browser instantiation has the great advantage that one can email a
link to someone who doesn't have Python installed and they can immediately
run the program. Here's a simple example:

http://www.glowscript.org/#/user/GlowScriptDemos/folder/Examples/program/Bounce-VPython

P.P.S. For a few months at the start of the GlowScript project in 2011
David Scherer, the originator of VPython, played a key role in creating the
foundations for the project.

On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 3:55 AM, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 5, 2015 at 4:43 AM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
>
>> As a user of Idle for several years, and not a beginner, I disagree with
>> 'only'.  That aside, I consider it unnecessary and diversionary from the
>> numerous known issues that will benefit *everyone*.
>>
>
> I was worried that you'd respond like this. *No* change to IDLE will
> benefit *everyone*, for the simple reason that few people outside the
> (non-higher) educational field use it. IDLE should not try to compete with
> things like PyCharm, nor with the Emacs/Vim world (and I consider most
> every text editor professional coders like to use these days on
> Linux/Mac/Windows to be in that world, from Sublime Text to Atom). IDLE's
> one redeeming feature is that it's bundled with Python, and this is a
> benefit mostly for classrooms where Python is taught as the first
> text-based programming language after e.g. Scratch.
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
>
> _______________________________________________
> IDLE-dev mailing list
> IDLE-dev at python.org
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/idle-dev
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/idle-dev/attachments/20150805/14533d92/attachment.html>