Python in High School

[John Henry]

On Apr 3, 12:24 pm, ajaksu <aja... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Apr 2, 5:01 pm, John Henry <john106he... at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > However, once I start teaching him variables, expressions, loops, and
> > what not, I found that (by surprise) he had great difficulties
> > catching on.  Not soon after that, we had to quit.
>
> This makes me curious: how much of videogamer are you? And your son?
>

You mean you are able to find a kid that isn't a videogamer these
days?  <grin>

My level of videogame went as far as Black Hawk Down and that was
about it.  I find it hard to comprehand why they like to do Gaiter
Hero III.  With Counter Strike, at least you have some interesting
scene to look at.  But then again, I am not a kid anymore (not by a
long stretch).


> I ask that because when I think about teaching programming to young
> kids, I imagine using terms they know from gaming, like "save
> slots" (variables/names), "memory cards" (containers),
> "combos" (functions, loops), "life meters" (counters), "next
> level" (conditionals, iteration, loops), "teammates" (helper
> functions), "character classes" and "characters" (class and
> instances), "confirm/cancel" (conditionals), etc.
>
> But I've never really tried to put all those together and find a test
> subject, so I'd like to know how fluent in this lingo you both were so
> I can assess my pseudo-didatic approach by proxy :)
>
> Regards,
> Daniel

Well, I can't say that I am a child education expert, I am only
commenting base on my last several years of volunteering activities.
I've found that whenever there is a visual approach to a topic, I can
hold their attention far longer.  Case in point, rather than asking to
read building instructions for a Lego robot, I gave them access to
Leocad: a CAD program that allow them to "put together" a robot
virtually.  They can spin the virtual robot around, break-up the
pieces virtually, and put them the robot virtually.  Then they build
the real thing from there.  When they're done, they can made their
product presentation using 3-D renderization programs (VPython stuff,
I can see now).  With this approach, I was able to hold the attentions
of the middle school kids - even a couple of 4th graders.  They were
able to "program" their robots using the Lego Mindstorm ICONic
programming language - and later onto the Labview based Robolab
language.  I think the color, the sound, the icons, videos of these
visual programming languages means a lot to kids.  I wish there is a
visual Python - much like the Robolab/Labview approach to programming.

Several of the kids continued to stay involved with our activities for
several years.  I was able to teach them "programming" without really
really teaching them "programming".  I hope they do well in high
school.  But then they told me the first "computer programming" class
at the local high school will be teaching Office, Flash, ...

Of the 18 middle-schools in our district, ours was the only one that
taught the kids about computer applications and "programming" early.
Unfortunately, due to budget cut, they had no choice but to cut that
class (lack of staff).  And without a teacher sponsoring our
activities, my volunteering activity is also coming to a close.

But I sure learned a lot about how kids learn (and can't learn).