Teaching Python

[Hank Fay]

Visual Basic has no inheritance; but it has a nice GUI IDE.

I'd look at wxPython as a freely available GUI IDE.  SPE (Stanni's Python
Editor), which integrates wxPython and Blender (which performs visual magic)
would give your students some capabilties they don't have in VB.

For web stuff there are some very nice frameworks that are freely available,
such as Webware, which has a persistence layer, and Twisted, which can do so
many things it is eponymous.  You would easily do a year of web stuff,
including ZOPE (Content Management) and Plone (visually acceptable Content
Management and user-friendlier Content Management) on top of ZOPE, after
they have Python down.

Hank Fay

-- 

"Mediocre Person" <mediocre_person at hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:513d6f09f74eb423c810692fb7bb1f46 at news.teranews.com...
> Well, after years of teaching grade 12 students c++, I've decided to
> make a switch to Python.
>
> Why?
>
>     * interactive mode for learning
>     * less fussing with edit - compile - link - run - debug - edit -
> compile - link - run -.....
>     * lots of modules
>     * I was getting tired of teaching c++! Bored teacher = bad
instruction.
>     * thought about tcl/tk but it's just too different syntactically
> (for me, not my students!) after so much time with languages like
> c++/ada95/pascal/BASIC/Fortran, etc.
>     * it appears to be FREE (which in a high school environment is
> mightily important) from both python.org or activestate.com. I think I
> like activestate's ide (under Win98) a bit better than idle, but your
> comments/suggestions?
>
> I've decided to give John Zelle's new book a try as a student
> textbook--it's as good an introductory CS book in any language I've
> seen. I've done a couple of small projects with tkinter, like what I
> see, and would like to introduct my students to it, although Zelle
> doesn't make use of it in his text.
>
> So, what pitfalls should I look out for in introducing Python to
> students who have had a year of Visual BASIC?
>
> Regards,
>
> chackowsky dot nick at portal dot brandonsd dot mb dot ca <-- have the
> spambots figured this one out yet?