Python Introductory Course (OpenSource, StartupChile)

We’ve just run 5 of the 6 nights of our Introductory Python course here in Santiago for StartupChile. The course aims to ‘give back’ to the Chilean economy by helping more people learn to program (we had a mix of locals and StartupChile members in our classes). In total we’ve taught 25 people (only 5 women though!). Here’s the group on the first night:

Initially I’d planned to run my 12 hour (2 day) course to one group of 15 people. In total over 80 people indicated that they wanted to attend the course so I split it into two groups of 15 (of the 80 a total of 27 committed to the available dates). We started this last Monday, we finished Group A last night (Saturday night late night coding lessons FTW!) and we finish Group B on Monday.

Both groups had prior coding experience (I said you’d need to know about variables, command line access etc) but little experience with Python. We covered 3 of the pythonchallenges and looked at:

  • IDLE immediate mode and for writing modules
  • variables, logic, loops
  • functions
  • id, mutable and immutable types
  • simple debugging and documentation
  • importing modules, using pip

I’ve open-sourced the course as Python in 6 Hours, you can grab the slides (ppt/pdf) and solutions to the two exercises from Github. This isn’t a deep/thorough introduction to Python, it is aimed at taking people with existing experience in another language into Python whilst covering some of the less-often-covered basics (like id, mutability etc).

If you’d like to run your own 6 hour Python course then feel very free to grab the notes and have a crack.

 


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.

1 Comment

  • Jorgen
    Great initiative!