Python education survey

[Devin Jeanpierre]

My university (University of Toronto) helped design Wing 101, and uses
it exclusively in introductory courses.

Overall, the only major sticking points that I saw (as a TA who helped
with the code labs and setup) were installation issues on OS X
(relating to X11) and some confusion on when the embedded interactive
interpreter gets refreshed ("hit run first"). It's a "big" editor with
lots of buttons, but IME students are good at ignoring things.

Truthfully I'm not sure why it's great for teaching, though. And there
were some discussions I overheard about perhaps switching to PyCharm,
which at least one professor thought was much better. And I personally
prefer simpler editors for my own use, not just for educational
purposes. Eh.

-- Devin

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Raymond Hettinger
<raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you use IDLE when teaching Python?
> If not, what is the tool of choice?
>
> Students may not be experienced with the command-line and may be
> running Windows, Linux, or Macs.  Ideally, the tool or IDE will be
> easy to install and configure (startup directory, path, associated
> with a particular version of Python etc).
>
> Though an Emacs user myself, I've been teaching with IDLE because it's
> free; it runs on multiple OSes, it has tooltips and code colorization
> and easy indent/dedent/comment/uncomment commands, it has tab
> completion; it allows easy editing at the interactive prompt; it has
> an easy run-script command (F5); it has direct access to source code
> (File OpenModule) and a class browser (Cntl+B).
>
> On the downside, some python distros aren't built with the requisite
> Tcl/Tk support; some distros like the Mac OS ship with a broken Tcl/Tk
> so users have to install a fix to that as well; and IDLE sometimes
> just freezes for no reason.  It also doesn't have an easy way to
> specify the startup directory.
>
> If your goal is to quickly get new users up and running in Python,
> what IDE or editor do you recommend?
>
>
> Raymond
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