Teaching python (programming) to children

[Michael Hudson]

Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com> writes:

> Paul Rubin writes:
> > I think a big goal of the Mindstorms crowd is teaching the concept of
> > debugging.  Most skills are taught with the idea that you master
> > something by learning it well enough to do it perfectly, so if you
> > make a mistake at it you haven't learned the skill yet.  Teaching
> > programming to young kids is supposed to develop the cognitive skill
> > of diagnosing and correcting errors.  That's more fundamental than
> > "applications" like cataloging mp3's or even understanding math
> > concepts.
> 
> In the same vein, if any of you out there are writing (or revising)
> 'how to program in Python' books or papers, could you please put
> the section on exception handling _early_, say, right after 'what
> is a loop', rather than in the last chapter?

That's what my tech review for one such said over the summer :) This
may have been too late, of course.

But Laura is right here.  Very very right.

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  First time I've gotten a programming job that required a drug
  test.  I was worried they were going to say "you don't have
  enough LSD in your system to do Unix programming".   -- Paul Tomblin
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