[Edu-sig] Teaching python to non-CS students

[Danny Yoo]

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!