[Edu-sig] New Python MOOC on Coursera with 100% CC-BY Materials and Book

[Charles Severance]

On Apr 1, 2014, at 1:35 PM, Adam Morris <amorris at mistermorris.com> wrote:

> This is really great.
> Just wondering why you didn't go with python 3?

Well the book I had is Python 2 and all my materials are for Python 2 and I wanted to put something up that was mature.  I need to rewrite my book and all the example code in P3 - but if you look at the sequence of the book - I kind of need to rethink things because of SortedDict.  I am sure I will figure things out - but I really liked the interaction between lists, tuples, and dictionaries as a gentle introduction to "data structures" - and while SortedDict is really cool - it in some ways makes things too simple for introducing data structures.  So I need to rethink the sequence, sample code, and assignments for Chapters 8-10 quite a bit.  Also Skulpt was Python 2.7 only and that is essential to the course.

Once the Coursera course is well-established, my plan is to teach Python 2 one more time at University of Michigan Fall 2014 and then start the rewrite of the book in Python 3.0 and then roll out an updated Python 3.0 Course and book summer 2015 and teach P3 Fall 2015 on campus.

Given that I am so focused on computational thinking versus particular programming skills - I don't think the P2 is too much of a problem.   I frankly think it would be great to take my class and then take *another* beginning class in P3.   I am of the strong opinion that beginning students (especially in High School) should be given more than one introductory course where they start from scratch so the concepts truly stick.  I think that we make a mistake of having sequences of courses that just get harder and harder and never loop back and review.

> Also, how do students cope with try/except without an exception being delineated? Could be that they type a variable wrong in the try block but python won't report the error? 

I treat it like control flow.  Since Python is so exception happy - and considers try/except the Pythonic way to do lots of things things - a simple introduction to try / except as control flow is essential early on.  The idea of try / catch / throw as communication is for a later class IMO.

> There are a lot of non-professional programmers who I'm going to ask to read it, so they aren't as scared of code... :) 

Thanks - let me know what they think.  

/Chuck

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