[Edu-sig] Elementary School Instruction

[Kirby Urner]

Hi Dave --

I had some home schoolers in that age group.  One activity that proved
popular with "madlibs" which is where you have this canned paragraph with
blanks in place of some adjectives, nouns, verbs (you're likely familiar
with the genre -- the story is usually pretty zany).  Example:

http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/sa6299/madlib1.py (note, the text is from
a published madlibs book, credit given).

I found kids enjoyed this activity, which came after a fair amount of shell
activity around substitution, which happened after we'd introduced the
dictionary as a data structure, e.g.:

  >>> thewords = {'noun1':'house', 'noun2':'mouse'}
  >>> print "In this %(noun1)s there lives a %(noun2)s." % thewords
  In this house there lives a mouse.

Once these concepts and syntax are clear, then I think it's OK to work with
pre-programmed code, i.e. I didn't make them write the simple loop that
gathered their word choices and stuffed them in a dictionary.  But we did go
over said code.  

As with human language learning, it's easier to read grammatical code than
it is to speak or write it (because so much of the work is already done).

I then used a lot of this same substitution technology to write scene
description language for POV-Ray.  The kids also enjoyed using POV-Ray
directly, without mediation by Python.  Typical code:

http://www.4dsolutions.net/satacad/pytools/povray.py

A prerequisite here is some appreciation for XYZ coordinates.  I got lucky.
My home schooling students already knew all about that stuff.

Some of this stuff at my web site was done with older kids (high school) so
if you poke around, you'll see material that's obviously too advanced for
9-12 year olds.

What really slows kids down is an inability to keyboard at all efficiently
-- hunt and peck, with a lot of hunting.  

Typing skills remain as important as always.  A prime motivator to increase
speed these days is IM and IRC, but sometimes kids this young don't have a
peer group that uses these typing-intensive interfaces.

Kirby

> -----Original Message-----
> From: edu-sig-bounces at python.org [mailto:edu-sig-bounces at python.org] On
> Behalf Of dave at lakegregoryics.com
> Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 10:13 PM
> To: edu-sig at python.org
> Subject: [Edu-sig] Elementary School Instruction
> 
> Has anyone here had experience teaching Python to Elementary School
> children 9 to 12 years of age? This kids are part of a gifted students
> elective program (upwards of 120 students) in the area where I live. I
> am in the planning stages of a 3 part series (18 weeks) covering
> beginning Python and would appreciate hearing about any experience
> and/or advice you might have.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dave Lanham
> LGICS
> 
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