Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
Done by Northland Polytechnic, available for download under CC-BY-NC-ND here <http://www.archive.org/details/IntroductionToPythonUsingTurtleGraphics>.
I have two problems with the presentation, which make things harder for the students than they should be.
First, the instructor has students edit code in an editor that cannot directly run the code. Save the file. Click to a command window. Enter 'python somefile.py'. Ugh. Python comes with IDLE. Let students use it. (Or some equivalent, but turtle works fine with IDLE.) Replace above with 'press F5'. If there is a SyntaxError, not uncommon for students, the edit window comes back with the cursor near the spot of the foul.
Within the code, the instructor does 'import turtle' followed by 'turtle.up', turtle.move(x,y)', etc. for tens of lines. Ugh. Either 'from turtle import *' (which turtle was designed for) or, if one does not like that, 'import turtle as t', some one can write 't.up', etc.
There is also a echo glitch in the audio when the video comes from the monitor, as opposed to the room camera.
Aside from the above, it seems like a decent intro presenting statements, names, conditional execution, repeated execution, and function encapsulation.
tjr -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
