Monday, March 26, 2007

I: Pedagogical Advantages of Python

What experience do you have teaching coding to beginners using Python as the target language? Using other languages? Especially welcome are comparison/contrast of teaching with language X vs teaching with Python from a pedagogical point of view.

2 comments:

Doug Blank said...

Michael,

I appreciate this effort to understand what is going on, and to promote Python!

A couple of points: every year, over 1,000 people get together in the US in an attempt to answer questions like these at SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education). These are hard questions that have a lot of subtlety, which require full papers to explore.

What might be useful here is to build up a set of references that point to papers, studies, and materials that try to answer these questions.

On the other hand, the answers to your question from a large number of teachers and institutions would also be enlightening. Perhaps a short survey could be created and sent out to such people and places. That could also probably be turned into a paper at SIGCSE.

In any event, I wish you luck toward you goals! Let me know how I can help.

Michael Tobis said...

Thanks to Jeff Ehler's timely query on edu-sig I found some useful discussion

here