After a bit of tension over securing a room, someone sorted us out and I will therefore be teaching another introduction to programming with Python, to a group of beginners, starting Monday! Exciting. I have a draft of everything I want to do on the first day, I need to …

I'm preparing my next course at the moment. Another introduction to Python for beginners, but in a different context: this is for a group of political sciences students, who use R for statistical simulations and are encouraged to look up Python for the next level of that module.

...Well I …

Here's an interesting article, "Cheating in Computer Science", that was recently posted on the IAEP mailing list. It's quite short and the problems it describes are worth mulling over:

• Why do we call "cheating" what will later in life be called "collaborating" and be a critical quality for success?
• Why …

Last Monday was the last session of my short "Introduction to programming, with Python" class. Eight adults signed up, the course lasted for 5 weeks on Monday evenings and overall the impressions are positive. I made progress in places, and learnt how to improve in others.

I suspect I must have sounded particularly freaked out when people were late last week, because this time (last Monday) several people added a variant of "but I love the course!" at the end of their message letting me know they couldn't attend, haha! I once again left full of …