On Sat, Aug 2, 2014 at 2:45 AM, Mark Summerfield <l...@qtrac.plus.com> wrote: > Last week I spent a couple of days teaching two children (10 and 13 -- too > big an age gap!) how to do some turtle graphics with Python. Neither had > programmed Python before -- one is a Minecraft ace and the other had done > Scratch.
When I've taught children (and adults!) with little programming experience, I usually have a single import for all the things I want them to use, something like: from my_defined_functions import * at the beginning of every script, usually named for the class I'm teaching. > > Suggestion #1: Make IDLE start in the user's home directory. I use the iPython Notebook now for these things. > > Suggestion #2: Make all the turtle examples begin "from turtle import *" so > no leading turtle. is needed in the examples. > in my universal import script I have the turtle imports, usually with both from turtle import * and import turtle, so I have a choice. > Suggestion #3: Make object(key=value, ...) legal and equiv of > types.SimpleNamespace(key=value, ...). I also make a data structure, a simple wrapper around dict, which I call Struct, defined as: class Struct(dict): def __getattr__(self,name): try: val=self[name] except KeyError: val=super(Struct,self).__getattribute__(name) return val def __setattr__(self,name,val): self[name]=val then I can do: x=Struct(a=5,b=10) x.c=50 x['this']='that' # or access like a dict bb ----------------- bbl...@gmail.com http://web.bryant.edu/~bblais -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list