Reading Books and playing with small Furry animals.

[Deg]

Had a quick skim through Snake Wrangling for Kids and Python for
Software Design: How to Think Like a Computer Scientist.

These are both good books and very useful as staff and student
resources. They are ideal for enthusiastic people who want some
independent material, but I thought it might be useful to recap the
reasons why I don't want us to produce something like these:

1) They consist largely of small pointless exercises. The only reason
for doing the exercises is to learn to program. This is not just a
case of wanting a Functional Skills type purposeful activity. I think
that for most of our students they will need a context to motivate
them.

2) It is difficult for the students to then be creative. Yes there
are end of chapter exercises but they are very closed and not very
exciting. This not only goes to motivation/engagement but also to
students thinking around the problem eg. why am I doing things this
way and how do I know that what I did was good.

3) The audience for their efforts is likely to be their teacher who
will have very little time to praise their efforts and probably finds
it hard to get excited about yet another student who solves exactly
the same problem.

By way of contrast I could get very, very excited about using
something like Furcadia (http://www.furcadia.com). For anyone who has
not seen this it is like Second Life but in 2-D and with small furry
animals rather than scantily clad avatars. The idea is that the users
build areas using a scripting language. The reason I like this is
because:

1) The environment is engaging. Students are going to want to be
there even before they have done any work.
2) The students can be creative. Each time they learn a new
technique they can then apply that technique in different ways in
their area. They will also not mind the repetition required to
consolidate learning.
3) They have an obvious audience for their work. I can well imagine
students going home and playing on Furcadia, visiting each others
dreams or even carrying on their scripting.

OK so I don't think Furcadia is practical. There are firewalls in the
way, the place is probably full of paedophiles and the scripting
language does not meet our needs, but I would like to try and build
some or all of these principles into what we do.

I have had a quick look at Python adventure game engine things but
could not really find anything that looked suitable, but maybe this
could be a longer term project.

Guido Van Robot looked good and I can see what you mean about it being
a bridge from logo to python. Could this be the basis of a year 7
activity? Not had a play with xturtle yet but don't want to get stuck
in turtle land for too long especially if they have done some logo at
KS2.

If anyone has found a small and interesting project using PIL I would
be interested.

Deg.