Teaching python (programming) to children

[Laura Creighton]

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?  I've decided that what
my brother's great insult program needed was:
	a) 1, possibly 2, dictionaries
	b) 1 loop
	c) exception handling for bad data
	(and, of course, a lot of insults.  Data collection is an
         important part of the scientific process...)

One of the nice things about programming is that you _can_ just try 
it and see.  Here's the intepreter. Go play.  If it blows up, nothing
particularily bad can happen.  But a great many new posters here
need to be _TOLD_ that.  They _ask_ 'What would happen if I typed ...'
rather than just typing it.  Clearly, they come from a background
where making mistakes is a much more serious business than just 
getting a ValueError.  I can't prove it, but I suspect that our
societies would be more fun to live in if more people, from an early
age, were taught how to clean up after things got unexpectedly messy,
and how to predict the sorts of messes that were inherant in any
situation.  There are days I feel that I am living in the section
of code marked /* CAN'T HAPPEN */.

Laura Creighton