<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 8:02 PM, Olemis Lang <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:olemis@gmail.com" target="_blank">olemis@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">Hi everyone !<br>
<br>
These days I'm planning to run another session of NodeSchool Havana<br>
[1]_ and I was wondering whether there is a similar community building<br>
a decentralized open source and collaborative platform to run<br>
workshops to teach Python programming . Do you know of anything<br>
similar ?<br>
<br>
.. [1] <a href="http://nodeschool.io/havana" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://nodeschool.io/havana</a><br>
<br>
--<br>
Regards,<br>
<br>
Olemis - @olemislc<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>I've been polling edu-sig (@<a href="http://python.org">python.org</a>) with similar questions, having had</div><div>three+ years with an in-house asynchronous so-called Nano, which allowed</div><div>Python students to submit programs and quiz answers for evaluation to </div><div>human evaluators (called mentors).</div><div><br></div><div>When every quiz submission is also an opportunity to ask specific questions</div><div>requiring customized sometimes researched answers, you're at one end of </div><div>the spectrum. Everything robo-graded where the machine evaluates in </div><div>mere milliseconds, serving millions, is at the other end of said spectrum.</div><div><br></div><div>Providing one-on-one coaching through mentor services is not practical in a</div><div>real time tutorial or workshop setting. Even with a one-to-one ratio (not </div><div>common), a difficult bug will not yield to scrutiny immediately, and some </div><div>concepts (such as 'yield' in Python) take time to digest. The ideal of always</div><div>sprinting is just not realistic. A steady climb but with frequent rests is more</div><div>how we develop any kind of muscles, including in a gym. The mentor and</div><div>student need slack, i.e. the liberty to follow their own timelines, not in lockstep.</div><div><br></div><div>The previous paragraph is a thinly disguised advertisement for more </div><div>asynchronous platforms coupled to live human mentors who may provide</div><div>customized feedback and field student questions. The robo-grading parlor</div><div>is useful to students who also have access to live humans, but over-reliance</div><div>on robo-grading is not going to benefit students beyond a certain level.</div><div><br></div><div>What Nano did for us is organize student submissions in queues, time </div><div>stamped, but returnable in any order. Our rule was three business days</div><div>max for any turnaround, with the average quite a bit less, sometimes </div><div>just hours or even minutes. Sorting by project meant evaluating many</div><div>solutions to the same problem and that could be a more productive order</div><div>for a mentor, ditto quizzes. Students could ask for clarification and more</div><div>background, and expect considered answers -- just not in real time.</div><div><br></div><div>I've also done real time workshops over the web, and that's a different </div><div>animal. Assuming high bandwidth (not always a safe assumption), I've</div><div>led groups of 20-21 through 40 hour Python marathons where I talk on</div><div>the microphone and share my screen, and they listen and type comments</div><div>to a chat window in real time. There's a place for such pedagogy (andragogy)</div><div>just as there's still plenty of room for real time meetups and having mentors</div><div>and students all in the same room together. </div><div><br></div><div>A potential pitfall is either/or thinking and imagining some contest between </div><div>all these modes where in fact such a contest does not exist. They're all </div><div>with us to stay. That being said, finding the right mix or sweet spot is in </div><div>itself a skill and I think we're still in the initial experimental phase of finding</div><div>out how client-server technology is going to change our learning strategies.</div><div><br></div><div>I say this in part based on our company's decision to discontinue with Nano</div><div>and try something else, disbanding the Nano-based team. Given I was on</div><div>that team, I've continued to have in interest in how to best manage workflows</div><div>in a "learning Python" situation. Google Classroom was on my radar but I've</div><div>not made much headway on that score. I'd be interested to find out about</div><div>more mentor-centric solutions especially (the robo-grader systems already </div><div>seem to be doing pretty well).</div><div><br></div><div>Kirby</div><div><br></div></div></div></div>