3 Suggestions to Make Python Easier For Children
Brian Blais
bblais at gmail.com
Tue Aug 5 07:36:17 EDT 2014
On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 2:45 AM, Mark Summerfield <list at qtrac.plus.com> wrote:
> Last week I spent a couple of days teaching two children (10 and 13 -- too big an age gap!) how to do some turtle graphics with Python. Neither had programmed Python before -- one is a Minecraft ace and the other had done Scratch.
When I've taught children (and adults!) with little programming
experience, I usually have a single import for all the things I want
them to use, something like:
from my_defined_functions import *
at the beginning of every script, usually named for the class I'm teaching.
>
> Suggestion #1: Make IDLE start in the user's home directory.
I use the iPython Notebook now for these things.
>
> Suggestion #2: Make all the turtle examples begin "from turtle import *" so no leading turtle. is needed in the examples.
>
in my universal import script I have the turtle imports, usually with
both from turtle import * and import turtle, so I have a choice.
> Suggestion #3: Make object(key=value, ...) legal and equiv of types.SimpleNamespace(key=value, ...).
I also make a data structure, a simple wrapper around dict, which I
call Struct, defined as:
class Struct(dict):
def __getattr__(self,name):
try:
val=self[name]
except KeyError:
val=super(Struct,self).__getattribute__(name)
return val
def __setattr__(self,name,val):
self[name]=val
then I can do:
x=Struct(a=5,b=10)
x.c=50
x['this']='that' # or access like a dict
bb
-----------------
bblais at gmail.com
http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais
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