[Idle-dev] Running beginner Pythons

[Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin]

If IDLE is special for education simply because it comes installed out of
the box[1],
perhaps what educators would really want is that IDLE included an easy way
to fetch any package from PyPI?
(Ideally, installing into a virtualenv that doesn't affect the machine, to
keep admins less anxious, and to allow easy resetting to clean slate.)

[1] There is also the fact that IDLE is simple, but here we're talking
about radical departures that could be easier outside, if the root issue of
installing stuff was solved...


2015-11-12 13:05 GMT+02:00 Aivar Annamaa <aivar.annamaa at ut.ee>:

> Hi!
>
> Maybe we should add a different interface for constructing standard Python
> programs?
>
> Grace (http://gracelang.org/applications/) is a textual language meant
> for learning programs and they built a Scratch-like editor for constructing
> Grace programs (http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~mwh/minigrace/tiled ,
> http://homepages.ecs.vuw.ac.nz/~mwh/vissoft2014.pdf)
>
> Similar thing could be done for Python. In fact, some of my students have
> already created a prototype: https://github.com/taivop/Monty
>
> I have plans to integrate this into Thonny, a Python IDE meant for
> beginners (http://thonny.cs.ut.ee/ ,
> http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2729094.2754849&coll=DL&dl=GUIDE&CFID=729521140&CFTOKEN=81247902).
> We recently used it successfully for teaching 1000 learners in a MOOC
> organized by University of Tartu.
>
> I agree with Serhiy that IDLE is not best place for such experiments.
> Thonny, on the other hand is built specifically for beginners and we
> welcome all kinds of new ideas. There is a plugin API available (not
> documented yet, but I'll get to it very soon).
>
> best regards,
> Aivar
>
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