[Pythonedu-wg] A new, kid-friendly Python editor

[Nicholas H.Tollervey]

On 21/09/15 14:15, Carrie Anne Philbin wrote:
> Since my talk around the development of a new text editor at Euro Python
> <https://youtu.be/_gU7sfTrz4c>in July and Pycon Australia in August,
> community members Ntoll (Nicholas Tollervey), Lord Mauve (Daniel Pope),
> and others have begun work on an open source project called Puppy
> <https://github.com/lordmauve/puppy>. Here is a video
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXfzfZzq1dc>of Puppy but I believe that
> more has been added and/or removed since it was filmed. I think this
> project could be what we are looking for and we would welcome the
> thoughts of the wg.
> 

OK... so the aim for Puppy is to be the simplest/friendliest editor for
new programmers. If there is anything that distracts them from coding
(no matter how useful a feature it may appear to be) we try to avoid it.

The UI has actually been made more minimalist since that video was shot.
We're also abstracting things into projects (so no need to faff about
with concepts such as files - and we'll automatically save versioned
files).

Remember, this is first steps programming we're addressing here - if
you're going to object that there's no access to <insert favourite
editor feature here/> then you've missed the point.

We're asking ourselves if we can find that happy place where we balance
simplicity with usefulness for anyone coming to programming Python for
the first time (be they 5 or 105 years old).

We expect them to graduate to "real" editors quite soon after they have
gained the confidence they need from using Puppy.

For those of you who like Philosophy of Education (like I do), this is a
classic twist on Lev Vygotsky's ZPD
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development). We're
concentrating on the "learner can do unaided" and ZPD rings (ref the
image in the Wikipedia article). Once Puppy falls completely into the
"learner can do unaided" zone, *other* more featureful editors will be
well in the ZPD and thus within reach of the learner. Does this make
sense..?

Ciao ciao!

N.

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