python in school notebooks/laptops

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, May 30, 2011 at 8:15 PM, John Thornton <secretelf77 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello
>         Is it a waste of time to try to get school admins to put python in
> their school laptops?

Two halves to this question.

1) Would it be of value if the school admins were to put Python on the
school laptops?
2) If you ask them to, would they?

The answer to #1 is "Undoubtedly". Cost? A tiny bit of disk space.
Benefit? Even if only one student in a thousand picked it up and
learned it, that's a huge number of people who've been exposed to a
better language than VB.

But the answer to #2, based on my cynical view of these things, is
"Unlikely". You could ask the school admins, but they'll point to some
policy from upstairs that says what they need to provide. And I don't
know who formulates that policy, but more than likely it's a
committee.

Who pays for all that software? I'm guessing it's part of one of those
perversities where something is valued more if it costs more ("We
spend $X million teaching our students modern computing"). Replacing
the netbook packageset with Ubuntu and a whole swathe of free software
(the significant part here being free-as-in-beer, but it would be
free-as-in-speech software too) would cut $400 per student off their
boast according to the figures you posted - but that doesn't seem to
include the OS itself, so possibly even more.

The other part of the problem is a huge lock-in involving grade
schools, tertiary education, and company employment agencies, all of
whom think that "computer skill" means "knows how to change cell color
in Excel". And that is not an exaggeration - my brother says that when
he was applying for jobs that required computing skills, the
recruitment agency wanted to know his ability level with Word 2003 and
Excel 2003. Getting past that is not going to be easy.

But if you can just get a smidge of extra software put on the laptops
(some nice easy tiny stuff - Python, 7-Zip, InfraRecorder - skip OO
because it's too heavy), nobody would notice the extra disk space
usage (even a cheap netbook will have storage measured in hundreds of
gig), and it gives them a chance to learn something decent. Bored
student browsing the Start menu... might not happen very often, but if
even one person learns Python, that'd be worth it!

Possibly the best way to encourage Python deployment would be to
require it to run some internal script. Then the interpreter will be
put on the laptops ("it's so tiny, won't cost anything to put it
there"), and IDLE will be available for anyone who wants it. Now the
question is, how can you get into a position where you can have a
script that's needed for every student...

Chris Angelico