[Tutor] Recommended Resurce or strategy for beginning students

Wed Feb 20 22:35:19 EST 2019

Hi All,

Just wanted to update this thread regarding a resource for beginning
students. We are now 4 weeks into the course and have found an excellent
youtube series that goes from absolute basics.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLAZ4kZ9dFpMMs5lskzBApYXn0bl7emsW

The big advantage for us in a classroom context is that students can work
through this at their own pace using an Ipad to watch videos and then a
computer to code..

I have some students who are flying through the course and are ready for
more advanced topics..others are working more slowly...but all of them are
enthusiastic and engaged...and the beauty of using a series like this is
they can just go onto the harder topics when they are ready.

After we finish this series my plan is then to go onto Mike's excellent
PySimpleGUI resource...https://pysimplegui.readthedocs.io/tutorial/

I'm sure the students will then enjoy the GUI elements of the code.

We'll also use the Turtle import option to add some graphics interactions

We then might look to use a robotics  resource which is GoPiGo
https://www.dexterindustries.com/gopigo-in-python-tutorials/ which gives us
a chance to explore robotics with Python.

The pleasing thing is how keen the students are to keep learning and asking
questions....

Thanks again for all your support and ideas!

Matthew Polack

On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 3:05 PM David <bouncingcats at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 22 Jan 2019 at 20:30, Matthew Polack
> <matthew.polack at htlc.vic.edu.au> wrote:
> >
> > Hi All,
> >
> > In our growing school we're teaching Python programming for the first
> time
> > as an elective subject with Year 9 and 10 students. (Had a dabble at this
> > last year with 3 students in Year 11)
>
> Hi Matthew and other readers,
>
> I wonder if you and any others here involved in classroom/group teaching
> might be interested in this recent presentation that I stumbled across:
>
> https://media.ccc.de/v/35c3-9800-how_to_teach_programming_to_your_loved_ones
>
> The section of this video which motivates me to write here is the two
> minutes
> from 19:00 to 21:00.
>
> What I find most interesting is his motivation mentioned there: he claims
> his
> procedure solves the problem of any students becoming "lost", feeling
> "stuck"
> at any particular step, not knowing what to do next, and unable to proceed
> without guidance.
>
> Quoting from the synopsis:
> The talk is based on many years of research by the Program by Design,
> DeinProgramm, and Bootstrap educational projects, as well as over 30 years
> of personal teaching experience in school, university and industrial
> contexts.
> A word of warning: The resulting approach is radically different from most
> teaching approaches used in universities and schools. In particular, it
> avoids
> teaching purely through examples and expecting students to develop the
> skills to arrive at the solutions on their own. Instead, it teaches
> explicit
> methodology that enables students to solve problems of surprising
> complexity
> on their own, whether they are 11 or 55, whether in a classroom, a training
> facility, or your home. Extensive documentation, material, and software to
> support this methodology is available for free.
>
> For anyone considering watching the whole presentation, I expect that there
> are many other aspects of this presentation to which people here could
> react
> negatively, for example:
>
> 1) The given title is misleading, in my opinion its subtitle would be much
> more
> representative: "Enabling students [by] example-driven teaching".
>
> 2) It recommends against Python, about this I have no opinion (except
> to respect the presenter's experience) and that is not why I am posting it
> here.
>
> 3) It emphasises functional programming style.
>
> 4) Despite possibly having an audience including skilled programmers, in
> the
> second half of the presentation the presenter does not skip quickly over
> the
> concept, but instead he chooses to demonstrate his concept by reproducing
> the same deliberate steps that he would use in a classroom of students
> with low ability.
>
> Despite all these possibly alienating aspects, and possibly others, I'm not
> really interested in those aspects, because they're not useful to me and so
> I choose to ignore them, instead focussing on what might be useful.
>
> Years ago I spent about a decade teaching undergraduate engineering
> students, from that context I consider this interesting and relevant.
> This presenter mentions that he has 30 years of of experience
> and commitment to teaching this subject, and considers most of his
> efforts a "failure" (at 02:00). Learning from such a person can save other
> practitioners a great deal of effort.
>
> So I felt that this was worth sharing here, I hope negative reactions
> or distractions don't distract from possibly useful information.
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