[Year 12 IT Apps] Slightly OT: Excellent Python Resource

[Savage, John L]

I have been trialling http://www.programarcadegames.com/ (an American college course) with a year 10 class. They like it and they get it. We've looked at codeacademy and a few others over the past couple of years and while they are often very slick we've been unimpressed by either their pedagogy or suitability for secondary students.

This site presents a self-paced chapter by chapter program. Each chapter is supported by videos on Youtube and consists of a teaching block where students would do some copy and paste into IDLE, a set of multiple choice questions to test understanding, a theory worksheet to reinforce, and finally a lab to apply. The labs are well structured and the students are guided through the structure and logic of a program without being able to copy and paste. I find it incorporates well into a classroom where I can sit with individual kids and steer them in a useful direction.

Lesson one treats IPO by building little specialist calculators, and by lesson 4 the kids are writing a text based adventure game (based on an old BASIC game "Camel"). If a student perseveres (and they probably will because it's fun) they will have produced their own animated game, having explored arrays, iteration and classes along the way.

Here is the table of contents

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Laurie Savage
http://accelerus.pvgc.vic.edu.au


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