[Pythonedu-wg] Python with science (and no games)

[Jeff Allen]

On 12/07/2016 18:52, Carrie Anne Philbin wrote:
> ...
>
> 3. Lesson plans, tutorials/resources. Have you written any that you 
> want to share with others? Then share them here with a new thread. 
> Spread the love!
>
I plugged this once in the RPi forums, but since you ask ... I wrote 
these resources for an after-school coding club and offer them here for 
people doing the same.

http://python-with-science.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ 
<http://python-with-science.readthedocs.io/en/latest/>

The introduction to Python (on RPi) is brisk and the projects are quite 
challenging. But the club has a high ratio of helpers to children (1 to 
5 or better) and so far it is working. By "working" I mean everyone had 
fun and learned something.

After the two introductory chapters, one can do the projects in any order.

Although constructed with a lot of care, it's not well-tested on 
children. I've used the introductory sections with two groups so far (on 
RPi) and some of the projects with a few individuals.

The club has children from years 4 to 6 of the UK primary system but I 
think the material would work (maybe better) higher up the school 
system. In one group, the children had completed around 5 Scratch 
projects (on PC) from the Code Club website, so had some basic ideas of 
variables and looping. The second group were younger on average and had 
done only 2 Scratch projects before we tried them on Python. A higher 
proportion of this second group had difficulty with the concepts but 
there were still some real successes.

Why another resource? I looked without success for something that 
connected to the serious use of Python, but that would be accessible to 
children. Rather than a game, each project has a light-touch science or 
maths aspect. When you introduce children to Python and a Linux-based 
computer, you put into their hands, at full strength, exactly the tools 
that thousands of scientists and engineers use everyday. There's 
something exciting about that.

Jeff Allen


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