[Edu-sig] CS0 course

[kirby urner]

> However, I am also well aware that the French education system is very
> different than the North American one.  The Canadian and American
> education, while fairly different one from another, can be considered
> nearly identical when compared with the French system.  French
> students generally have a much more rigorous mathematical background
> at a given age; the educational approach/style is very much "formal"
> rather than "informal". Also, there seems to be a lot more early
> specialization - so I don't think that courses like CS0 are very
> likely to exist within the French system.   However, I will check...
>
> André

Lots of moving targets in this picture.

Given your idyllic circumstances, I'd think you'd want to customize and
localize around your geographical context and expected student
demographics, right down to the screen saver and local web server
level.  Plone has ways to customize all the menus and interface
controls per whatever language.  How about an inhouse Plone site,
with CS0 spending at least a few hours dissecting it, in terms of
MVC and the underlying Zope machinery.  Zope is very big in Europe,
I can say from personal experience.

If you were a larger research university, I'd think developing Python
bindings to some French-English phrase book database and translation
service, ala Google's, would become a part of your infrastructure.  Maybe
such bindings already exist, in the sense of Python hacks (e.g. xml-rpc
"translate this into French" requests to the server farm in The Dalles).

As a curriculum writer, I have to assume increasing familiarity with Python
among the pre-college set, at least in some parts of North America. CS0
will be easier if the ambient culture gets back on the track we were on
with BASIC, per that Salon article 'Why Johnny Can't Code'.

But a good CS0 has ways of not penalizing those who're just sampling.
There're always more languages, or one could do that "leveling the playing
field" thing and do it all in Scheme for a couple weeks, then switching to
Python.  This idea of "immersion" works well for computer languages, not
just human ones (at least for students in the "good at languages" category
-- which it sounds like your school attracts).

Anyway, the challenges would be much the same in any language I would
think.  It's more finding the writers who'll commit to doing the work.

Kirby