[Edu-sig] Oxford Physics Python course

[Michael Williams]

As promised I have edited the Oxford course into a state such that it is
semi-comprehensible and, hopefully, useful to people on this list. 

It's available in HTML format (as generated by Fred Drake's scripts) at
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sann1276/handbook/> and in PS at
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sann1276/handbook.ps>.

Perhaps I'm being harsh but I don't really think it's ready for use as a
general purpose tutorial (quite apart from all the site-specific
information). The course is designed to teach widely applicable
programming skills (not Python) that students of physical sciences use
every day (hence the lack of GUIs, OOP, etc.). It is used by first year
Physics undergrads so we are able to assume considerable mathematical
literacy, but no computing skills.

This course (or something at this level) will almost certainly replace
the current Pascal course next October, so it will be undergoing
significant chages before then; in particular, all the exercises are
taken directly from the old Pascal handbook and are perhaps not
applicable to Python. One of the theses of this project (which I am
conduncting for roughly one-third of my Masters dissertation) is that
Python is easier to learn so we hope to introduce some more challenging
exercises.  

Over the next few weeks (England's progress in the World Cup allowing!)
I will be preparing the first draft of the dissertation discussing the
successes and failures of the trial we have been running (we have used a
group of 2nd year students as guinea pigs) and the relative merits of
Python as a teaching language.

I'd love to hear any comments on the style or content of the course.

-- 
Michael