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Teaching python (programming) to children

John Roth johnroth at ameritech.net
Fri Nov 9 18:02:37 EST 2001 
"Michael Hudson" <mwh at python.net> wrote in message
news:u4ro4nddv.fsf at python.net...
> Laura Creighton <lac at strakt.com> writes:
>
> > Paul Rubin writes:
> > > I think a big goal of the Mindstorms crowd is teaching the concept
of
> > > debugging.  Most skills are taught with the idea that you master
> > > something by learning it well enough to do it perfectly, so if you
> > > make a mistake at it you haven't learned the skill yet.  Teaching
> > > programming to young kids is supposed to develop the cognitive
skill
> > > of diagnosing and correcting errors.  That's more fundamental than
> > > "applications" like cataloging mp3's or even understanding math
> > > concepts.
> >
> > In the same vein, if any of you out there are writing (or revising)
> > 'how to program in Python' books or papers, could you please put
> > the section on exception handling _early_, say, right after 'what
> > is a loop', rather than in the last chapter?
>
> That's what my tech review for one such said over the summer :) This
> may have been too late, of course.
>
> But Laura is right here.  Very very right.

Then possibly the decision to make exceptions classes was
wrong from a tutorial veiwpoint? Technically, it was the
right decision, but it does shove exception handling rather
late, after classes have been introduced.

John Roth
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