[Edu-sig] Intro to Python course - followup

[Anna Martelli Ravenscroft]

Kent Johnson wrote:
> I am teaching "Introduction to Programming with Python" with a local 
> adult ed program. Here is a status report:
> 
> There are seven students in the course, five women and two men, ranging 
> in age from (my guess) late 20's to early 60's. Most of them have some 
> previous programming experience, mostly long ago and far away. One of 
> them is a refugee from a C++ class.
> 
> I am using "Python Programming for the absolute beginner" as the text. I 
> think this was a good choice. The students seem to like and understand 
> the book and they are able to do the exercises. I like the level of 
> detail in the book; it is enough to do real work but not overwhelming.
> 
> I have been following the presentation in the book pretty closely, 
> partly because it is a lot less work for me, but also because the book 
> is well thought out and consistently builds on what has gone before. We 
> cover one chapter a week.
> 
> I have taught five two-hour classes so far. We have covered through 
> chapter 5, Lists and Dictionaries. The last class was great! I had quite 
> a few notes from the chapter and was worried that I wouldn't get through 
> them, but the class got it quickly and we went into some more advanced 
> material. I did a lot of work with list comprehensions and even showed 
> them compound data structures (lists of tuples, dicts mapping string to 
> list) and decorate-sort-undecorate.
> 
> The best part of the class for me was to see the students catch on to 
> how cool Python is. They were smiling and getting it. I honestly don't 
> know how much they will retain of the more advanced material but for 
> them to get a hint of how easy it is to work with data structures in 
> Python was great.
> 
> The best student has written a real program already (a program that does 
> something he cares about). It reads a CSV file and makes a consolidated 
> index. It's pretty simple stuff but he figured out the file part and a 
> simple CSV parser on his own. I showed him the csv module and he thought 
> that would be very useful for other programs.
> 
> At the end of the class last week, after I demonstrated some 
> particularly over-the-top bit of Python coolness, this student was 
> thunderstruck. I wasn't sure if I had finally lost him, or if he was 
> just blown away by how cool it was, so I asked him. He was blown away 
> :-)) We're talking slack-jawed, slumped-back-in-the-seat amazement, folks!
> 
> I'm having a great time, too. I definitely want to do this again, maybe 
> I will try a course for experienced programmers next time.

Awesome!

Thanks for the status report.

Anna