Suggested Curriculum¶
The Arcade library is designed to support education. Get students hooked on programming. Then start teaching them new concepts, as students discover the need.
Arcade’s theme: “Only advanced actions should require advanced knowledge.” What does this mean? For example, if a students want to create an image with drawing commands, they should not have to know about defining functions, classes, or using decorators, or any other advanced programming topic.
If you are looking for an on-line textbook to get ideas from, see:
http://arcade-book.readthedocs.io/
Below is a rough list of common first-course items to teach, and the order they could be taught in.
Stage 1:¶
Draw¶
Learn to call drawing commands and create your own drawings.
Learn to use variables to change your drawing.
Teach students about common error messages, and how to read and use them.
Stage 2:¶
Draw and animate with functions¶
Learn to create functions, so you can make your own draw_tree commands
Learn to animate with functions and static variables (or skip this and use classes later. Static function variables are weird.)
Teach students about expressions and simple mathematics in Python.
Stage 3:¶
Learn to use loops¶
Learn to loop
Learn nested loops (learn to use nested loops to draw grids, triangles, etc.)
Testing and unit tests