Recommendations for intro to python+programming lecture to Humanities MA students

[Göktuğ Kayaalp]

On 2019-11-21 10:02 GMT, Nick Sarbicki <nick.a.sarbicki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The simplest thing is to use the 3.8.0 python.org installers.  This use
>> pip to add anything you consider essential.
>
> As mentioned previously, you do need to make sure that they tick the box to
> add Python to the PATH on windows. It is almost guaranteed someone will not
> do that and will then have a very hard time figuring out what has gone
> wrong (happens to me every time I teach).
>
> Considering that this is a lecture and not a workshop I'm assuming the
> students aren't actively installing and running python while you are
> teaching. In which case, whilst I would mention pip, I would probably just
> have the required libs preinstalled on my computer ready to go. Learning
> pip is easy to do and if they're interested later can be taught separately.
> But watching someone installing packages on the terminal is not very
> interesting. On the other hand if the students are actively following along
> and running python within the lecture then they will obviously need to be
> shown how to do this.

So I asked someone to try test installing Python 3 and using pip to
install SciPy, and it failed even with my remote guidance.  Hopefully
I’ll have some time with a Windows PC in the coming weeks to test
myself, but yeah, installation seems like it’ll be a problem.  In our
case we failed twice b/c we didn’t have vcredist and vc++ build tools,
but still failed when we instaled them: IDK if it wants the entire
Visual Studio, which is a whopping 20G of download.

My plan is to prepare a guide for them to get set up on their computers,
but not for the lecture.  It’s informal, but I don’t really want to
lose time with a small installfest.  The instructions are aimed at easy
set up after or before class only.

Guess I can help those who fail later on private time...

> Also whilst the remit of the lecture is to showcase how to do statistics in
> Python, I wouldn't take this as an absolute limit. I would go through
> examples of graphs, probably taking inspiration from
> https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations and using something like
> dash (https://dash.plot.ly/). I would also try to show more creative ways
> of playing with data - for instance I worked on this project dedicated to
> showing data using GIFs (
> https://datagifmaker.withgoogle.com/editor/racetrack - don't look too hard
> at the representations though).

These are some beautiful links, and especially that first one I’ll
definitely use it for my Pearson Correlation mini-lesson next week, so
thanks a lot!

> But instead of spending a whole lecture explicitly on statistics I would
> probably use the last 10 minutes showcasing other uses of Python which are
> (apologies to those who find statistics utterly encapsulating) a bit more
> interesting. For instance I have a <200 LOC game of pong (technically a
> _graphical_ user interface) which is usually fun to showcase (
> https://gitlab.com/ndevox/pygame-pong/blob/master/pong.py). I'd also be
> tempted to show off things like websites (which could display statistics
> publicly), chatbots (which, if using something like an NLTK classifier, are
> essentially statistical machines) etc. Think about what interests you the
> most and see if you can display it on the screen in some way.
>
> Essentially whilst it is very important to show them to make graphs in
> various ways, you'll probably struggle to captivate the entire audience
> with this. Whereas ending with some slightly wilder but more enticing
> examples can make those who weren't interested in the statistics want to
> pay more attention to what you have been saying.
>
> - Nick
>
> On Wed, Nov 20, 2019 at 11:33 PM MRAB <python at mrabarnett.plus.com> wrote:
>
>> On 2019-11-20 21:58, Terry Reedy wrote:
>> > On 11/20/2019 11:09 AM, Göktuğ Kayaalp wrote:
>> >
>> >> The first problem is installation: apart from me, a Debian user,
>> >> everybody has Windows or Mac laptops, and IDK how you install Python on
>> >> them.
>> >
>> > The simplest thing is to use the 3.8.0 python.org installers.  This use
>> > pip to add anything you consider essential.
>> >
>> For Windows, I use "Windows x86-64 executable installer" for 64-bit and
>> "Windows x86 executable installer" for 32-bit from
>> https://www.python.org/downloads/windows/.
>> --
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>>

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İ. Göktuğ Kayaalp	<https://www.gkayaalp.com/>
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