Do you like to see your students so engaged that they don’t want to stop working on your programming exercises and assignments? We can’t promise that this will happen, but we have anecdotal evidence that our hands-on approach to introducing programming by analyzing interesting graphics, decomposing them, using our paper cards to describe their structure, and translating that structure into Python code can have this effect. Our approach is centered around a small compositional graphics library (PyTamaro) and is supported by a curated collection of over 100 activities (about a third of them created by high school teachers).

We use this approach to prepare Swiss high school informatics teachers for teaching programming, we use a similar approach in an undergraduate introductory programming course, and several high school teachers successfully adopted the approach for their own informatics lessons and contributed to the collection of activities. Programming concepts covered include: constants, functions, expressions, repetition, libraries. Graphics concepts: basic shapes, colors, rotation, composition. Computational thinking concepts: pattern recognition, problem decomposition, abstraction.

Bring a laptop with a web browser. We will bring the paper cards and we will provide a web-based environment in which you will develop your graphics in Python.

Library, online environment, and collection of activities: https://pytamaro.si.usi.ch/