Python and Schools

[Jason Smith]

Harald Massa wrote:

> For education there are small drawbacks:
> 
> - 50% of all exercises "to teach programming" are already solved in the
> standard-library or are a method of a buildin object / are allready build
> in the core language
> 
> - 45% of these exercises are solved within "the python cookbook",
> available also online

Holey moley!  And all this time, I had it in my Safari queue!

> - if you learn programming with Python and later have to use Java or
> Visual Basic, it will be the most frustrating experience for the young
> fellows.

I don't think so.  Particularly with computer science courses, I think it's
often the case that students are required to re-implement features that
come with a library.  For example, consider a course where students
implement their own data structures in C++, and then they implement
iterators to mimic the STL.  (I actually took this course, so there's your
existence proof.)  If a student uses code from a book, or say some GNU
code, then that's simply academic dishonesty; and any good teacher would or
should catch these things as part of their general grading techniques.

Where I think python would be great is at the lower educational levels.  I
think we all agree (heh) that programming as part of a general computer
literacy course should be necessary for any high-school diploma today, just
like Chemistry or such.  And in that arena, as a student's first exposure
to programming, Python shines.

I mean, if we're all studying sorting, and I turn in

  a = [ 'this', 'is', 'a', 'list' ]
  a.sort()

well then clearly I just got an F.  But it's not Python's fault.


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