Does anyone in the group have experience with teaching Python this way? Are there other resources I should consider? Any insight into what might motivate an adult to start learning to program?

Thanks for any help, Kent

A person who signs up for an 8 week class is presumably somewhat motivated to learn programming. I'd try to get a sense from your students whether they already have some strong leanings/interests and focus on giving them the tools to develop in that direction. Those getting the most benefit will be those using time *between* meetings to self-teach as much as possible. I'd stress that whereas class time is potentially a big help, learning to programming, like learning to play the piano, is ultimately something you must do on your own, through practice. Kirby

on 12/4/03 11:30 AM, Kent Johnson at kent@pondview.mv.com wrote:

I am planning an adult education course that will be an introduction to programming in Python. The biggest challenge I see is to actually teach a meaningful chunk of programming in a very limited time - 6 to 8 classes with learners with a variety of background and interest levels.

You might also be interested in some of our materials from a graduate course in introductory programming I teach in our medical informatics training program. We have a range of ages and most of the students have had a bit of exposure to programming but are by no means experts; essentially all are from healthcare backgrounds. Our one-semester course meets for three hours once a week. The first hour is spent reviewing homework and concepts from the previous week, the second hour is used to introduce and explain new material and the third hour is usually dedicated to code review--basically code grabbed from anywhere that illustrates the key concepts of the week. The class is taught in a computer lab using projected web pages on a whiteboard as a discussion focus. We draw on top of the projected code with markers and students are encouraged to copy the code into IDLE or SciTE and edit/run it on their machines during the discussion (as we also do on the board). We cover most of basic Python (including an introduction to Tkinter) in 7 weeks, then survey regular expressions, database access, image processing, network programming (sockets, urllib and XML-RPC) and HTML/XML processing in the remainder of the course. There are weekly programming assignments (Kirby Urner is correct, this is the most crucial part of the course) and a longer project of the students' choosing during the second half of the course. It's been great to see several students who took the course go on to use their own Python programs as key parts of their Masters or PhD research; these are students who would not have included a programming component in their work at all were it not for Python. The course isn't quite where I want it yet, but it's improving with each iteration. You're welcome to have a look and use anything that you wish. The main course page is http://jhh.opi.upmc.edu/main/pop/. Click the ClassSchedule under Class Information at the right for links to the individual sessions. Best wishes, Jim Harrison ________________________________________________________________________ James H. Harrison, Jr., MD, PhD <mailto:jhrsn@pitt.edu> Associate Professor, Pathology Informatics, Department of Pathology 5230 Centre Ave., 3rd Fl. UPMC Cancer Pavilion Pittsburgh, PA 15232 office: 412-647-5529 | fax: 412-647-5380 | cell: 412-445-0836 Faculty Member in Residence, Center for Biomedical Informatics Associate Professor, Intelligent Systems Program University of Pittsburgh Suite 8084 Forbes Tower Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2582 office: 412-647-7113 | fax: 412-647-7190 "If you want sense, you'll have to make it yourself!!"-Norton Juster ________________________________________________________________________