[Edu-sig] Best approach to teaching OOP and graphics

[Linda Grandell]

> I think graphics is a great way to teach programming, because it gives 
> such strong feedback to the students.

So do I. The students seemed rather happy with the text-based
programming in the introductory course... And why shouldn't they? There
are so many things to learn about programming itself before one even
knows how to realizes if something is missing :) However, as we got
closer to the end of the course, comments such as "Could this program be
done with graphics?" started to occur. Not often, but still. The
post-course survey showed that most students had not missed anything
during the course, but some stated that "Graphics would have been fun".
So, now I have decided to introduce graphics in one way or another in
the continuation course.

> How about making a small graphics library that has Shape objects. You 
> create a shape object and manipulate it's attributes such as position, 
> color, size, numOfVertices (triangle, square, pentagram), etc. Then you 
> can teach subclassing a shape object, and finally making your own from 
> scratch. PyGame of course is a great environment to build such a thing.

This sounds like a good idea. I was thinking about using the pygsear
package first, mainly because I then would have ready-made material and
examples to start from. The course starts in three weeks, so I am not
really spoiled with time here. However, your suggestion should not take
that long to implement. I will put it on my list of possible alternatives.

/Linda