[Edu-sig] PyWhip ???

[David MacQuigg]

At 04:58 PM 3/3/2009 -0800, kirby urner wrote:

>I also invite visitors to my Oregon Curriculum Network site:
>
>http://www.4dsolutions.net/ocn/cp4e.html
>
>The Pythonic Math at this site is better than anything else on the Web
>as of March, 2009, bar none.

We're looking for something more interactive.  The storyboard stuff is cool.  Videos take too much bandwidth.

I've always thought lectures are a terrible way to teach technical subjects, but I can see the advantage of having audio to supplement a sequence of slides, and avoid taking your eyes off where they should be focused.  Bruce Eckel's Thinking in (Java, C++, Python) series is excellent, but he never finished the Python version http://www.mindview.net/Books/TIPython.  There is a great opportunity here for a good teacher.

Some thoughts on how we might expand on this:

We need a complete online course in Python, including PyWhip, Lectures in Python (slides with audio), and a forum where students could get questions answered, like comp.lang.python, but something more private, where students won't feel shy about asking dumb questions, and more focused, where we can have a lot of discussion on a narrow topic.  The topic this week is strings.

This could be a "service course" for non-CS technical professionals or students who could take it as a pre-requisite for engineering and science classes.  The costs of production and delivery would be very low, mainly paying teachers to participate in regularly scheduled online "classes".  I can imagine a class of 200 students with two or three teachers, so questions could be answered typically within a few hours.

I tried to do this with a class in C, but we had to use the University's cumbersome, officially-approved teacher-support software - no email notifications when a question is posted.  That was a real problem leading to sometimes a day of delay before I could check to see if there were any questions.  The login procedure was a pain.  Google forums are all we need.

-- Dave