[Edu-sig] Recommendation for editor+console or IDE for teaching beginners

[Laura Creighton]

Will you be doing this in English, French, or both?  However, make sure that
what you use has adequate online documentation in both English and French
(and ideally many more) so that people who mostly cannot learn from lectures,
but badly need _something to read while they are working things out_ can
find all the stuff they require.

Ahead of time it is hard to know how the numbers break down but if you
expect to get a large number of self-motivated 12 and 14 year olds, then
you are also expecting to get a large number of people who pick things up
by reading the book and for whom lectures are either a) painful or b) a
pleasant way to socialise with others who are trying to learn the same
things.

It is more or less impossible to teach many of these people by making
lectures and having them listen to them because they have almost no
experience of learning by being talked to.  Their entire educational
experience is one where they read the textbook, first,  and thus come
to class more or less already knowing what the teacher is going to teach
and looking to the teacher for some clarification on corner cases, and the
like.  The smarter they are, the less they need to be taught, having already
taught themselves ...

Thus they have almost no experience in learning by being talked to, even by
the teachers who are the very best at lecturing.

Higher education can be excruciatingly hard for these students if the
teacher hasn't made his own textbook yet, and expects the students to
learn from the lectures.  It doesn't help matters that such teachers
are notoriously bad lecturers.  Naturally, the teachers expect the
students to be already well trained in learning by 'being talked to'
-- their expectation is that this is how the students have been
learning their whole lives.  And the students, generally don't
understand what the problem is.  They know they are smart, and they
know that they are floundering in class, but they don't know that
their problem is that they aren't very good at learning from lectures,
and badly need some texts to read if they are ever to make sense of
things ...

If you can get these people to recognise themselves then, no matter how
they end up doing in this particular course, you will do them a priceless
service.  

The problem gets exponentially worse if the language the teacher is talking
in isn't your preferred language for learning in.

It's late here.  I will write more later.

Good luck.

Laura

ps would go with IDLE myself.  Now that tkinter is shipped with modern
Mac distros, there hasn't been much of a problem any more here.  But make
sure that absolutely everybody knows what a PYTHONPATH is, can find their
own, and can check that their PYTHONPATH is what it should be.