(Oct-13-2016, 10:52 AM)badteacher Wrote: take these programs home show their parents without having to install any extra stuff on their own PC's at home, which I believe a simple executable file will allow them to do.
.exe files are only helpful for Windows machines. Maybe many parents have such computers, but you should not presume so. Especially as a techer, I would encourage to also inform about Mac, Linux, etc. It seems like only Windows which does not come with Python already installed in the OS.
If you package an .exe with your python script, you essentially put the needed python installation files right alongside your (probably much smaller) code. This also means, if you want to show more than one .exe to the same people, you will always need to package and copy these larger files with all this extra stuff added each time. It seems indeed more intelligent to once install Python on Windows, and be done with it.
Then they can also show their parents the easy-to-read source code they wrote in Python, and it may get easier to understand, whereas this big binary .exe file will just be some form of magic, and can't even be adjusted on-the-fly if the parents have a nice tweaking idea they would like to see.
Maybe consider for future courses.
edit: Some nice feature-rich and easy Python installations for Windows include Python(x,y) or WinPython. They bring along lots of 3rd party modules you may or may not use in your course as well, also editing software, etc. etc.
