We could do this for Europython. Do we want to? What would we teach, and what would we need? Laura ------- Forwarded Message Return-Path: marketing-python-bounces@wingware.com Delivery-Date: Wed Mar 29 14:41:01 2006 Return-Path: <marketing-python-bounces@wingware.com> Received: from www.wingide.com (www.archaeopteryx.com [209.251.75.100]) Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2006 21:16:01 -0600 From: "Michael Tobis" <mtobis@gmail.com> To: marketing-python@wingware.com MIME-Version: 1.0 In response to a query from a father wanting joint programming tutorials with his son that appeared on the Chicago Python User Group (ChiPy; pronounced "chippie") mailing list, I volunteered to teach an introductory class in Python to all comers. I announced this on the ChiPy list and on the Linux Users of Northern Illinois (LUNI) list, and made no other effort to promote it. My colleague Andy Harrington, a professor at Loyola University of Chicago was able to arrange for a classroom for a Staurday afternoon. We met last weekend, and it went pretty well. In addition to another ChiPy volunteer, Robert Ramsdell, and Andy, over a dozen people showed up, three women, two fathers with young sons in tow, and about ten guys, all seriously motivated. After talking for too long, I walked them through some very simple exercises with the interactive prompt. We got as far as writing loops to draw a diamond figure in ASCII graphics. A few people managed to draw the whole kite figure which was my objective. You can see the slides I showed up with at http://webpages.luc.edu/~mt/pyfl/pyfl.html If I had it to do over, I'd just "dive in" (to coin a phrase) and skip the preamble, which I think was mostly a mistake. This was my first experience teaching complete beginners, and it will be helpful to me in preparation for my formally teaching an introductory CS course at Loyola this summer. I think most of the participants found it worthwhile as well. Probably the most interesting thing is we did almost zero promotion to fill the room. Just an announcement on the ChiPy list and an announcement on the Linux Users of Northern Illinois list. This leads me to suspect that you could pull this together in a smaller city, if you promoted it harder. There are people out there who want to learn Python. We should reach out to them. regards Michael Tobis _______________________________________________ marketing-python mailing list marketing-python@wingware.com http://wingware.com/mailman/listinfo/marketing-python ------- End of Forwarded Message