New Python MOOC on Coursera with 100% CC-BY Materials and Book
Hi all, I just wanted to let you know about a new Free University of Michigan Python course I am teaching on Coursera called "Programming for Everybody". https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn The idea of the course is not to be a first Computer Science course - but instead to be a "programming literacy" / "computational thinking" aimed at somewhere between middle of high school and freshman in college or adult learners looking for an "on ramp" for learning about technology. The course is based on 100% CC-BY materials available from: http://open.umich.edu/education/si/coursera-programming-everybody/winter2014 We not only provide the slides and sample code uncer CC, but also ready-to-load course exports from Blackboard and Moodle. There is also an open source Skulpt-based auto-grader that is part of the course that I host and make available at no charge as long as I don't run out of resources my University of Michigan-provided servers. The book is a heavily adapted variant of Allen Downey and Jeff Elkner's Think Python book. It is about 80% all new and published as "Python for Informatics". All the electronic copies (including an iBooks version with embedded video tutorials) are free and the printed textbook is $8.99 on Amazon. http://www.pythonlearn.com/book.php I am hoping to use the high-profile of Coursera to attract a wide range of students and teachers from around the world to get a basic introduction to programming in Python in a way that they can perhaps take their skills and materials back and teach them locally. I am hoping to create a learning community that can hep increase the number of high school and community college teachers who can competently teach a Python class. I would hope that you might share this with various high school and college teachers that you think might be interested in participating in the course. I owe thanks to lots of folks in the Python Edu community who did early work that I have built upon like Jeff, Allen, and Brad Miller (Skulpt). Let me know if you have any questions or comments. Charles Severance University of Michigan School of Information www.dr-chuck.com
Gonna try and see if it fits my students' interest. Would be happy to report if you want. Thanks for sharing. Cheers On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 6:43 AM, Charles Severance <csev@umich.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
I just wanted to let you know about a new Free University of Michigan Python course I am teaching on Coursera called "Programming for Everybody".
https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn
The idea of the course is not to be a first Computer Science course - but instead to be a "programming literacy" / "computational thinking" aimed at somewhere between middle of high school and freshman in college or adult learners looking for an "on ramp" for learning about technology.
The course is based on 100% CC-BY materials available from:
http://open.umich.edu/education/si/coursera-programming-everybody/winter2014
We not only provide the slides and sample code uncer CC, but also ready-to-load course exports from Blackboard and Moodle. There is also an open source Skulpt-based auto-grader that is part of the course that I host and make available at no charge as long as I don't run out of resources my University of Michigan-provided servers.
The book is a heavily adapted variant of Allen Downey and Jeff Elkner's Think Python book. It is about 80% all new and published as "Python for Informatics". All the electronic copies (including an iBooks version with embedded video tutorials) are free and the printed textbook is $8.99 on Amazon.
http://www.pythonlearn.com/book.php
I am hoping to use the high-profile of Coursera to attract a wide range of students and teachers from around the world to get a basic introduction to programming in Python in a way that they can perhaps take their skills and materials back and teach them locally. I am hoping to create a learning community that can hep increase the number of high school and community college teachers who can competently teach a Python class.
I would hope that you might share this with various high school and college teachers that you think might be interested in participating in the course.
I owe thanks to lots of folks in the Python Edu community who did early work that I have built upon like Jeff, Allen, and Brad Miller (Skulpt).
Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Charles Severance University of Michigan School of Information www.dr-chuck.com
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
-- Roberto
On Apr 1, 2014, at 6:07 AM, roberto <roberto03@gmail.com> wrote:
Gonna try and see if it fits my students' interest. Would be happy to report if you want. Thanks for sharing.
Please let me know how it goes - there is a lot of room for improvement once it is encountered by students in the real world ot side of my own classroom at the University of Michigan :) /Chuck
This is really great. Just wondering why you didn't go with python 3? Also, how do students cope with try/except without an exception being delineated? Could be that they type a variable wrong in the try block but python won't report the error? There are a lot of non-professional programmers who I'm going to ask to read it, so they aren't as scared of code... :) Nice. Adam
On Apr 1, 2014, at 12:43 PM, Charles Severance <csev@umich.edu> wrote:
Hi all,
I just wanted to let you know about a new Free University of Michigan Python course I am teaching on Coursera called "Programming for Everybody".
https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn
The idea of the course is not to be a first Computer Science course - but instead to be a "programming literacy" / "computational thinking" aimed at somewhere between middle of high school and freshman in college or adult learners looking for an "on ramp" for learning about technology.
The course is based on 100% CC-BY materials available from:
http://open.umich.edu/education/si/coursera-programming-everybody/winter2014
We not only provide the slides and sample code uncer CC, but also ready-to-load course exports from Blackboard and Moodle. There is also an open source Skulpt-based auto-grader that is part of the course that I host and make available at no charge as long as I don't run out of resources my University of Michigan-provided servers.
The book is a heavily adapted variant of Allen Downey and Jeff Elkner's Think Python book. It is about 80% all new and published as "Python for Informatics". All the electronic copies (including an iBooks version with embedded video tutorials) are free and the printed textbook is $8.99 on Amazon.
http://www.pythonlearn.com/book.php
I am hoping to use the high-profile of Coursera to attract a wide range of students and teachers from around the world to get a basic introduction to programming in Python in a way that they can perhaps take their skills and materials back and teach them locally. I am hoping to create a learning community that can hep increase the number of high school and community college teachers who can competently teach a Python class.
I would hope that you might share this with various high school and college teachers that you think might be interested in participating in the course.
I owe thanks to lots of folks in the Python Edu community who did early work that I have built upon like Jeff, Allen, and Brad Miller (Skulpt).
Let me know if you have any questions or comments.
Charles Severance University of Michigan School of Information www.dr-chuck.com
_______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
On Apr 1, 2014, at 1:35 PM, Adam Morris <amorris@mistermorris.com> wrote:
This is really great. Just wondering why you didn't go with python 3?
Well the book I had is Python 2 and all my materials are for Python 2 and I wanted to put something up that was mature. I need to rewrite my book and all the example code in P3 - but if you look at the sequence of the book - I kind of need to rethink things because of SortedDict. I am sure I will figure things out - but I really liked the interaction between lists, tuples, and dictionaries as a gentle introduction to "data structures" - and while SortedDict is really cool - it in some ways makes things too simple for introducing data structures. So I need to rethink the sequence, sample code, and assignments for Chapters 8-10 quite a bit. Also Skulpt was Python 2.7 only and that is essential to the course. Once the Coursera course is well-established, my plan is to teach Python 2 one more time at University of Michigan Fall 2014 and then start the rewrite of the book in Python 3.0 and then roll out an updated Python 3.0 Course and book summer 2015 and teach P3 Fall 2015 on campus. Given that I am so focused on computational thinking versus particular programming skills - I don't think the P2 is too much of a problem. I frankly think it would be great to take my class and then take *another* beginning class in P3. I am of the strong opinion that beginning students (especially in High School) should be given more than one introductory course where they start from scratch so the concepts truly stick. I think that we make a mistake of having sequences of courses that just get harder and harder and never loop back and review.
Also, how do students cope with try/except without an exception being delineated? Could be that they type a variable wrong in the try block but python won't report the error?
I treat it like control flow. Since Python is so exception happy - and considers try/except the Pythonic way to do lots of things things - a simple introduction to try / except as control flow is essential early on. The idea of try / catch / throw as communication is for a later class IMO.
There are a lot of non-professional programmers who I'm going to ask to read it, so they aren't as scared of code... :)
Thanks - let me know what they think. /Chuck
On Tue, Apr 1, 2014 at 7:07 PM, Charles Severance <csev@umich.edu> wrote:
I think that we make a mistake of having sequences of courses that just get harder and harder and never loop back and review.
Hear hear! +1 Kirby
participants (4)
-
Adam Morris -
Charles Severance -
kirby urner -
roberto