On Apr 1, 12:27 pm, sprad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm a high school computer teacher, and I'm starting a series of > programming courses next year (disguised as "game development" classes > to capture more interest). The first year will be a gentle > introduction to programming, leading to two more years of advanced > topics. > > I was initially thinking about doing the first year in Flash/ > ActionScript, and the later years in Java. My reasoning is that Flash > has the advantage of giving a quick payoff to keep the students > interested while I sneak in some OOP concepts through ActionScript. > Once they've gotten a decent grounding there, they move on to Java for > some more heavy-duty programming. > > I've never used Python, but I keep hearing enough good stuff about it > to make me curious. > > So -- would Python be a good fit for these classes? Could it equal > Java as the later heavy-duty language? Does it have enough quickly- > accessible sparklies to unseat Flash? > > I want to believe. Evangelize away.
I highly recommend that you read the introduction chapters in two of the books on this site: http://www.greenteapress.com/ The first book is called "How To Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python". The second book is a follow-up edition to that one, and is called "How To Think Like a (Python) Programmer". All of the books there are written by school teachers, so I think you will find valuable insight there. The same books also have a Java and a C++ flavor. All are free downloads. My very first serious look into Python came from this series, and I thoroughly enjoyed learning the basics. I think the text was so successful for me because the content is well-connected. As far as which language to choose - well, you can make the choice yourself after reading at least the introductions of all the books. If you do decide on Python, there is a library called "pygame" that may achieve your visual game programming goals. Enjoy! -Basilisk96 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
