On Sun, 15 Dec 2002, chester_b wrote:
I'm currently working on a project to create a programming class for non-computer science students. The class is meant a college level intro class (so it is not meant to be hard, just an introduction). I want to use python.
Hi Chester,
Questions: 1) Has anyone tried to take a similar approach?
Hmmm... you might find the book "Simply Scheme", by Matthew Wright and Brian Harvey useful: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/simply-toc.html It's not Python, but it still might be very helpful as inspiration: you may be able to pull some really good examples from it and use them in your Python course. The book is tailored toward people who are interested in programming, but don't have a CS background. Its focus is less on math and numbers and more towards computing with sentences and words, and this may appeal to non-CS students. Forgive me for my enthusiasm; my background biases me somewhat about this. *grin*
2) i don't know bio or chemistry. Have people tried to teach biology or chemistry (or any other discipline) students python? What did you do for projects? (l looked at biopython, which seems like a great tool kit, but i couldn't find example projects, i could have over looked them though).
The Newcomers page on Python.org, http://python.org/doc/Newbies.html is a good resource that you can pool for material, and it lists a few tutorials for the beginning Bioinformatician or Physicist: http://www.pasteur.fr/recherche/unites/sis/formation/python/ http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sann1276/python/handbook/ The first has more substantial examples with Biopython. I've also seen that Python's starting to get used with linguistics, especially Natural Language Processing: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~cis530/ http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~cs114/ Out of curiosity, what kind of students are you expecting in your class? What's the length of the course? Good luck to you!