Hi Emanuelle, On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 7:17 AM, Emmanuelle Gouillart<emmanuelle.gouill...@normalesup.org> wrote: > Dear users of Numpy and Scipy, > > here is an informal report on the last event of the Python African Tour, > which took place in Dakar (Senegal) on July 6-10th. It might interest
Many thanks for this great post, I am very happy to see this kind of effort sprouting organically in different places. I had the chance to do something similar with Stefan, his advisor and colleagues a few years ago in Stellenbosch, South Africa, and it was a phenomenal experience. The audience was extremely engaged and the facilities first-rate, and I enjoyed it enormously. I'm glad to hear that you've set up a mailing list for your students to continue growing, but I'd also encourage them to subscribe to the 'normal' numpy/scipy lists. Even if they initially feel a bit shy about posting, simply 'lurking' on the lists for a while and reading the flow of information can be very useful both to learn technical ideas and to get familiar with the discussion patterns of a community. This will ease them into naturally engaging the upstream projects when they feel comfortable, which I think in the long term is both useful and necessary. > Speaking about difficulties, one may say that there was some disparity in > the level of experience inside the group, some being very well at ease > with array programming while others were obviously discovering > programming. It was therefore difficult to meet everybody's needs, but > well, I hope everybody learned something! Audience heterogeneity: that's always the hardest part in these things, and we face it everywhere. It's the main source of concern even at the main Scipy conference intro tutorial, since the audience tends to be all over the place in terms of background and experience. Mmh, I just had a thought. A number of us have by now taught reasonably organized workshops of this kind in different places and institutions. I wonder if it wouldn't be a good idea to have a page on the scipy site collecting this information, with a short paragraph about the event and a link to any additional external materials that may exist. This could encourage others to create similar things in their own communities, whether with the help of one of the previous presenters or fully independently. Does that sound useful? In any case, thanks again for the great post! Best, f _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
