whaleygeek
commented
8 years ago Hi Soslug,
GPIO Zero is a simplified abstraction, with a view to getting younger children and beginners into digital making, without actually doing much actual programming. It's all about 'wiring things up' and less about sequence, selection, and iteration. It's all about inputs and outputs, and less about the algorithms in the middle.
However, at some level you have to learn the real language to do other things beyond just wiring inputs to outputs. Learning a textual programming language to decompose a problem into smaller steps, developing algorithms, and using computational thinking, are key aspects of the national curriculum that teachers have to teach and assess. Python as a language does not only run on the Raspberry Pi, and I always hope that readers will later progress to bigger platforms (and those platforms do not use GPIOZero).
I love the work done on GPIOZero, and there is nothing stopping anyone writing their own resources around GPIOZero should they wish to - but I see it as a start, not the whole story. I see it as a way to tease people into making and tinkering, where the natural progression should be to progress to algorithms and deeper computational thinking that can be applied in a variety of wider contexts, hopefully leading many of them to a career in computing.
I have no plans to rewrite my book to simplify it. I see GPIOZero as a stepping stone that leads to bigger things. I think it does an excellent job as a stepping stone. But we need people to ultimately learn the real language, learn real computational thinking, and learn to develop real algorithms.
Hope this makes sense!
David
@whaleygeek
soslug
Now that GPIOzero has been adopted and is used in Jesse and looking at you Python code for Minecraft progams, it does not look as though you are using this particular library with in the listings. Does this mean you will need to re-write your book or will you be sticking with this programming method.