[Edu-sig] Recommendation for editor+console or IDE for teaching beginners

[roberto]

Why don't you try cloud.sagemath.com? or https://trinket.io/

They both let your students work at a distance and collaborate with you.
Hope this helps.

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 4:47 PM, Christian Mascher <christian.mascher at gmx.de
> wrote:

>
> Hi Andre,
>
>
>  I would really like some advice based on practical experience teaching
>> beginners.
>>
>>
> I personally would  stick with Idle. There was a time, when it was
> problematic under MacOS  because tkinter was missing there - but those days
> are over.
>
> As an all-platform, _already (battery-) included_ editor, Idle is simple
> but pretty good. There is not much you have to explain which concerns the
> ide.
>
> Most of the problems of beginners in Idle (and I always use idle in class,
> apart from reeborg) are not very idle-specific (indentation, copy and paste
> in console-mode, miximg tabs and spaces, saving, importing).
>
> You will have to explain the difference between programming at the prompt
> or in a file, but you would have to explain similar things in other ide's
> as well.
>
> If you want to keep it safe and simple, write programs with Idle only in
> files (File->New File, and run them with F5). Most technical problems arise
> when using the live-prompt (session-saving is useless).
>
> Some students used idle and pygame together some years ago with no
> problems.
>
>
>
>
>> 1. Use IDLE.  Free, part of the standard distribution.  I never used it
>> very much myself and I keep reading about how tricky it can be to set up
>> properly for beginners - mostly, I gathered, due to path problems on
>> Windows.   There is a proposal to make it better (
>> https://github.com/asweigart/idle-reimagined/wiki) but it is doubtful it
>> will be realized soon enough (or at all) to make it worthwhile waiting for
>> it.
>>
>>
> I haven't encountered path problems with idle recently (about since the
> introduction of Windows XP and python msi-installers ...)
>
> When Pygame is installed Python has got to find it, but that shouldn't be
> a concern of Idle.
>
> Having to install only two things (check for the python dependency of the
> pygame-version first!) would be my choice.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Christian
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-- 
Roberto
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