In response to a query from a father wanting joint programming tutorials with his son that appeared on the Chicago Python User Group (ChiPy; pronounced "chippie") mailing list, I volunteered to teach an introductory class in Python to all comers.
I announced this on the ChiPy list and on the Linux Users of Northern Illinois (LUNI) list, and made no other effort to promote it. In addition to another ChiPy volunteer and a CS professor friend, over a dozen people showed up, three women, two fathers with young sons in tow, and about ten guys, all seriously motivated. My colleague Andy Harrington, a professor at Loyola University of Chicago was able to arrange for a classroom for a Staurday afternoon. We met last weekend, and it went pretty well. After talking for too long, I walked them through some very simple exercises with the interactive prompt. We got as far as writing loops to draw a diamond figure in ASCII graphics. A few people managed to draw the whole kite figure which was my objective. You can see the slides I showed up with at http://webpages.luc.edu/~mt/pyfl/pyfl.html If I had it to do over, I'd just "dive in" (to coin a phrase) and skip the preamble, which I think was mostly a mistake. This was my first experience teaching complete beginners, and it will be helpful to me in preparation for my formally teaching an introductory CS course at Loyola this summer. I think most of the participants found it worthwhile as well. Probably the most interesting thing is we did almost zero promotion to fill the room. Just an announcement on the ChiPy list and an announcement on the Linux Users of Northern Illinois list. This leads me to suspect that you could pull this together in a smaller city, if you promoted it harder. There are people out there who want to learn Python. We should reach out to them. Michael Tobis --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "edupython" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/edupython -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
