real life examples

[Alex Martelli]

"huber" <nospam at wanted.com> wrote in message
news:u48q19.cth.ln at adsl.bapnt...
> i try to teach python to my son (13 years old)!
> but instead of stupid for loops, classes nobody ever needs and so on .....
> are there some good real life examples a child could be interested in ?

Try 'Alice', http://www.alice.org/; he can start using it in
a purely interactive fashion, then, later...:

"""
Advanced uses of Alice will definitely want to use the underlying scripting
language, rather than the "drag and drop" world-building interface.  To
access this, go to the animations tab, right-mouse-click on the white area,
and select "Add Python Code Box".

Alice's scripting language is Python.  You will definiately want to visit
www.python.org which has tons of very nice documentation -- start with their
tutorial.
"""

(quote from http://www.alice.org/advancedtutorial/).


To be honest, that would have left me pretty cold at 13 --
I never was very interested in pretty pictures, animation,
and so on; the ability to use Python to compute conditional
probabilities in games (card games, but not only) would have
been just the thing to fire up my enthusiasm.  But I suspect
I wasn't a very typical 13-year-old; the 3D graphics and
animation stuff may prove interesting to many 13-y-o's.


Alex