[Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

[Richard Guenther]

Hi Vern and Andy,

I just joined this list and this is exactly the kinds of discussions I'm looking for.  I too am a teacher and will be teaching Python, although this next semester I will not have an official class, just a python programming club (at the high school level).  

In the past I have done BASIC programming clubs with middle school students but have moved on to Python instead.  The great part about clubs is that they are voluntary, and students tend to be more motivated than they are in a class.  In these clubs, students often go far beyond where I would expect them to in a structured class.

Andy, your question is deceptively tough, and I agree with Vern that I would expect them to get the general idea.  I would expect them to have to "mess around" with Python a bit, though, to get it to work correctly.  At any rate, I've learned in years of teaching to scaffold greatly, even when to me it would seem like an easy assignment.  Perhaps breaking the task up into preliminary, simpler, versions would be helpful.

Here are some of ideas for assignments that I wrote down on a legal pad recently, when I was looking forward to teaching Python.  Some of these may seem easy, but they do give a good idea of where a student is at.

1.  Write a program that asks students for their two favorite foods and have it suggest a (concatenation) combination food for them to try (from Michael Dawson's Python Programming 2nd ed.).

2.  Write a program that asks the user for two numbers and then adds them for the user.

[Actually, number two can lead to many variations, using multiplication, etc.  This would make a great project to show how software can evolve, with the final version greeting the user, asking what operation to perform and on how many numbers, etc.  This assignment would start out very simple in version 1.0, but could someday turn into something that would contain a variety of function calls for factoring numbers, finding the square root, and so on.]

3.  Write a program that asks the user for a sentence and then prints it back in reverse.

[Again, this one could lead to many variations: "now have it print the sentence back with all the "a" characters changed to "4"s, all the "e"s changed to "3"s, and so on (leetkey)"]

4.  Write a program that asks the user for a number.  If the number is odd, multiply it by three and add one, if it's even, divide by two.  Now do the same with the answer....

5.  Write an area-finding program.  It asks what shape the user has (square, rectangle or triangle) and the computes the area depending on what measurements the user enters.

These are my notes, not the final versions I would present to students, but you get the idea of how things can go from really simple ("write a program that asks the user's name and then says hi to him/her by name"), to quite complicated.  Keep working with your students!    

Richard


----- Original Message ----
From: Vern Ceder <vceder at canterburyschool.org>
To: Andy Judkis <ajudkis at verizon.net>
Cc: "edu-sig at python.org" <edu-sig at python.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 5, 2007 5:44:36 PM
Subject: Re: [Edu-sig] a non-rhetorical question

Hi,

We do brief surveys with 8th and 9th graders, so I'm somewhat familiar 
with the age and skill level. I would say that *most* students should be 
able to answer this question after 4 weeks (depending on how much 
looping they've done, of course). By "answer" I don't mean necessarily 
get full credit, but at least get the basic idea right - setting up a 
while loop and prompting for user input......







       
____________________________________________________________________________________
Get the Yahoo! toolbar and be alerted to new email wherever you're surfing.
http://new.toolbar.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/index.php
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/edu-sig/attachments/20070705/10df2eb2/attachment.htm