Teaching Pyhton on Wintel

[William Park]

> Call me misguided, but I've decided to teach an introduction to
> programming class using Python. The audience are the scientists in my
> (evolution/ecology research centred biology) department and we'll be
> using the local computer lab, which is kitted out out with a network
> of modestly powered Wintel machines. So:
>
> 1. Any advice on which IDE etc. of Win Python to use?
> 2. Anyone done a similar class, like to advise on approaches or books
> to base it off?

Did a 2-day seminar few years ago.

If your audience is programmers, then getting their favourite editor
working on Windows would be more important for the smooth and productive
class.  Doing any example requires some sort of typing.  I did a quick
summary of "standard python tutorial doc", followed by detailed control
structure, function calls, and other non-oop stuffs, and finally class.
Use lots of examples, especially have them type and see for themselves.

If your audience is non-programmers, well... leave out OOP stuffs.  They
won't appreciate or use it, anyways.

-- 
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry at yahoo.ca>
8 CPUs cluster, (Slackware) Linux, Python, LaTeX, Vim, Mutt, Sc.