[Edu-sig] Reminder: Early Bird Registration for PyCon Ending Soon

[Jeff Rush]

Greetings.  As the co-chair for the upcoming Python conference, being held in 
Dallas (Addison) Texas, I want to remind folk to register before early bird 
registration prices end.

The event is the fifth international Python Conference, being held Feb 23-25, 
2007 at the Marriott-Quorum in Addison, with early-bird registration ending 
**Jan 15**.

The conference draws approximately 400-500 attendees from diverse backgrounds 
such as scientists from national and medical labs, college/K-12 educators, web 
engineers and the myriad of IT developers and programming hobbyists.  Those 
new to the Python language are welcome, and we're offering a half-day "Python 
101" tutorial on the day before the conference, Thursday Feb 22 to help you 
get up to speed and better enjoy the rest of the conference.

Some of the really cool talks are:

   - Easy creation of interactive tutorials
   - Good-bye Hello World: Rethinking Teaching with Python
   - Visual Python in a Computational Physics Course
   - Python for Students of the Modern World
   - pyweek: making games in 7 days
   - Keynote: The Power of Dangerous Ideas: Python and One Laptop per Child
   - Keynote: Premise: eLearning does not Belong in Public Schools
   - Creating games with Pygame on the GP2X
   - Keynote: The Importance of Programming Literacy

Being run by the Python community as a non-profit event, the conference 
strives to be inexpensive, with registration being only $260 (or $195 if you 
register prior to Jan 15th), with a further discount for students.  On the day 
before the conference we are running a full day of classroom tutorials (extra 
charge per class) and then after the conference is a free four-days of 
sprints, which are informal gatherings of programmers to work together in 
coding on various projects.  Sprints are excellent opportunities to do agile 
pair-programming side-by-side with experienced programmers and make new friends.

Other activities are lightning talks, which are 5-minute presentations to show 
off a cool technology or spread the word about a project, open space talks, 
which are spontaneous gatherings around a topic and, new this year, a Python 
Lab where experienced and novice programmers will work together to solve 
challenging problems and then present their solutions.

The conference is also running four keynote talks by leaders in the 
programming field, with a special focus on education this year:

   "The Power of Dangerous Ideas: Python and One Laptop per Child"
      by Ivan Krstic, senior member of the One Laptop per Child project

   "Premise: eLearning does not Belong in Public Schools"
      by Adele Goldberg, of SmallTalk fame

   "Python 3000"
      by Guido van Rossum, creator of Python

   "The Importance of Programming Literacy"
      by Robert M. "r0ml" Lefkowitz, a frequent speaker at O'Reilly conferences

I believe you will find the conference educational and enjoyable. More 
information about the conference along with the full schedule of presentations 
with abstracts, is available online:

   http://us.pycon.org/

Thanks for any help you can give in spreading the word,

Jeff Rush
Co-Chair PyCon 2007