In developing this repo as a general resource I'd like to keep the end goal in mind:
Have a selection of high quality beginner-friendly courses that any experienced Pythonista can teach at project night!
Towards that end I have some principles and a lot of questions I hope to get answered as we start.
Courses should all be:
- interactive: Minimal instructor talking, maximal student doing.
- structured: Ideally I'd like to have sequences of material like "1. Basic Syntax", "2. Libraries", "3. Advanced Basics: Objects and functions"
- beginner friendly: Keep in mind a target audience of new Pythonistas.
Suggest a folder per course? Folder may contain courseware, extra resources (data files, etc).
We need a generic setup page. Install Anaconda Python 2.7 before class and clone this git repo...
I'd like to have an extra piece of content that gives an overview and instructor notes for a given course. Ideally 5 minutes of prep should get an experienced Pythonista up to speed. Desired information:
- overview of material
- How long will it take to cover the material?
- Timing points (half done at first lab)
- Typical sticking points (if students don't understand x try y).
What's the best way to get students to write code in class? Empty cells to be completed? Partially working code? How does the student know they did it right?
I'd like to nudge students away from a consumption model (sit and listen and read) and towards a participatory model (do exercises, ask questions).
What does completion look like? Can we measure it, grade it, etc?
Should we plan to get students to fork on github and commit and share completed lessons?
I'm also confident that in part we are re-inventing the wheel. Who else has done this? I'm interested in other:
See the Software Carpentry series - http://swcarpentry.github.io/python-novice-inflammation/ and converted to ipynb by Matt Davis at https://github.com/jiffyclub/2015-07-06-scipy/tree/gh-pages/python
Are there other resources like http://ipythonblocks.org/ we should use?