We're two middle school teachers learning and teaching Python [audio]

Check out the BBC micro:bit origin story. It's a fantastic little board that was given out to about a million 7th graders in the UK starting in 2016. It would be great to get more devices out so kids can learn to tinker and code. We are fortunate that each of our students has access to a computer that works well for coding. And Python runs on just about anything. :)

The Pi is an excellent environment for learning to program - I love how it puts programming front and center. I imagine many poor kids couldn't do much with it until they got a keyboard, mouse, and monitor from the school as well. Some of these items can easily be found for free but perhaps not as much in poor neighborhoods.

That's a great idea. We've seen some challenges in 2021 with Google Colab in school environments and they've only recently been resolved.

We love using Colab for teaching coding. The Jupyter notebook environment is great for learning, and the familiar Google Docs interface makes our students feel comfortable right away.

I'd love to make a Colab-based course for kids. Just haven't been able to devote the time to building it out fully. We have most of our Python basics materials in a Colab and we use it for our returning students to get back up to speed at the start of a new course.

I know Python, and my niece love’s Minecraft. Maybe this is the missing link, since I’m in NY and she is in CA

Their first episode was in 2018: https://www.teachingpython.fm/episodes/page/7

So maybe that's what happened?

I think you could revolutionize education if you did this.

Consider this - learning is not about receiving factual information. Rather, it's about transitioning through a series of states that take you from being someone who does not know a thing to someone who does.

It's fairly obvious that for most people, receiving a snippet of factual information does not trigger those state transitions! Usually, what does trigger those state transitions is experimentation.

Experimentation increments you through those states. But effectively nobody records those intermediary states and state transitions. Egregiously, services that could sort-of do this, like stack overflow, explicitly do not.

Having that history would provide two things: more relevant information for learners, and data that would be useful for teachers to engineer a better curriculum.

I'd been working with technology my entire life prior to starting to teach in 2018. When we started the podcast, it was because we were learning so much with our students that we needed a way to discuss and organize all of it.

When I look back on it, it's incredible how much I learned WITH my students. What we're really teaching them is not Python, it's how to learn new things, especially when it's difficult.

Depends on what you are interested in-- for your own kids, maybe the latest about Digital Citizenship is really for anyone associated with kids. But we have an episode about hardware 78, 67 the Mu editor, 56 AI and Machine Learning with Kids, Pythonic Parenting with Anthony Shaw,Episode 13 Block Base programming with Edublocks and Josh Lowe...

I went to four different Broward County high schools: McFatter Tech, Fort Lauderdale Preparatory, Western, and Sagemont. No idea what they're like now, but 20 years ago it was like something out of a bad movie.

First a network administrator frames the kid and gets him expelled, claiming that the slow, buggy Mac network is due to the kid hacking it with AOL Punters. Next school, the computer teacher has no idea how to even write HTML, and tells the kid to write the school's website and a calendar app for the teachers (for no pay of course, that would be child labor!). The kid removes viruses and fixes incorrect proxy settings in school computers, and is subsequently banned from the computer labs. Any computer issue is blamed on the kid, because his permanent record says he was expelled for hacking. Finally he's sent to a private school where everyone gets a laptop, and proceeds to learn how to scam ad companies, write networked programs to remotely share the homework answers with all the kids (p2p), and in his spare time builds parallel computing clusters and router linux distros that fit on floppies. After 9th grade he drops out, because clearly he wasn't learning anything!

Maybe we shouldn't even teach advanced computer classes, and instead just let the kids go wild. Maybe having a set curriculum takes away from them learning how to teach themselves and pick their own interests.

I feel the same way. One of the limiting factors in the growth of these programs is not just the funding for hardware and software, it's the lack of qualified teachers that can effectively develop and run the programs.

Fortunately, there are some State of Florida programs that will help fund teacher training for STEM subjects, especially computer science. (https://www.fldoe.org/academics/standards/subject-areas/comp...)

Finally, one of the reasons we started the podcast (and our school has been VERY supportive) is to share as much as we can about our experiences to help support and inspire other teachers. We're lucky that we could learn and work together. Many computer science teachers don't have any peers in their subject area. We wanted to make a podcast that allowed them to be the third person in the room as we talked through the challenges, successes, and lessons learned from our teaching experience.

It's been an extremely rewarding journey so far.

Yes -- thonny is awesome! We did an episode way back in 2019 about our favorite editors for teaching. (https://www.teachingpython.fm/25)

I've used it a lot for coding Microbits, and it works really well.

You can pick up the basics of Python in an afternoon.

Perhaps the strangest bit for people used to other languages is signifiant indentation. Some hate it, but most people seem to adjust to it OK.