There’s some pretty good stuff in Thonny for young coders. It also has a range of panels that enable you to inspect various items, such as variables, objects, and the heap (the memory space where items are stored). The approach in Thonny is much more straightforward.

You often find debuggers in powerful IDEs, but they tend to require you to manually set breakpoints (places where the program freezes so you can examine the code).

Click here to read Object Orientated Programming in issue 54.

Click here to read Beginner’s Guide to Coding in issue 53.

You can see the variables and objects being created, and values being passed into functions or assessed by comparators. Instead of running your program, it steps through the code line by line. One of the best features is a powerful, but easy-to-use, debug mode. Thonny has a range of additional features that are perfect for learning programming. You can then use the shell to interact directly with the program accessing variables, objects, and other program features. As with Python 2/3 IDLE, you enter a program in the script editor and run it in the shell. When you start Thonny, you’ll see a new script editor and a shell. See also: Programming a Raspberry Pi with Python It offers a lot of advanced features not currently available in the Python 3 (IDLE) program, which is still included with Raspbian.

Just open up the program, which you’ll find under Menu > Programming. Thonny comes with Python 3.6 built in, so you don’t need to install anything. Using Thonny, it’s now much easier to learn to code. Thonny is a new IDE (integrated development environment) bundled with the latest version of the Raspbian with PIXEL operating system.

Raspeberry pi zero install python 3.6