The PythonSneks Teaching Field Guide

An introductory curriculum for learning Python, built following Instructional Design principles. The materials of the course are meant to be open-source and evaluated, in the hopes of establishing a baseline introductory level course. The target audience is explicitly undergraduate students in a university setting who are not computing majors, but are in STEM.

SIGCSE Links

• Field Guide
• GitHub Repo of Materials
• Canvas Site
• Presentation Slides
• Curriculum Materials Packaging BoF
• Interventions Report

SIGCSE Talk

Field Guide Outline

1. Course Overview
2. Learner Analysis
3. Course Topics
4. Staff Roles
5. Tools
6. Design Decisions
7. Setting up your Course
8. Module Guide

Appendices

1. Course Explanations
2. Alternative Courses
3. Action Design Research

Curriculum Materials

The following links allow you to browse the curriculum on GitHub:

• Presentations: Prerecorded and in-person presentation materials.
• Lessons: The transcripts of the prerecorded videos along with the organization of activities to complete in chunks.
• Projects: The public version of the project writeups, without the starter code.
• Quizzes: The public version of the quizzes (without the answers).
• References: Reference materials including API documentation for strings and the turtle module.
• Reflections: Writing assignment writeups that require students to reflect and respond.
• Programming: Programming question writeups and starter code.
• Evaluations: Analyses we conducted in evaluating our course.

The Canvas Site

The materials here are destined for a Canvas site. Materials are synchronized using Waltz (well, they are in Version 2; in Version 1 we had a more ad-hoc script, but eventually pulled the “final” versions using Waltz).

You can visit the Canvas site here: https://canvas.instructure.com/courses/1380806

Credit

A number of people have been involved and should be recognized:

• Cory Bart is the project leader - he made a lot of stuff and is very tired.
• Larry Cox is the instructional designer and has been invaluable for both curriculum development, paper writing, and project planning.
• Allie Sarver was an undergraduate research assistant and did some awesome research on how we used peer learning in the course.
• Michael Friend was an undergraduate research assistant and did some awesome research on the effect of worked examples on student learning.
• Panagiotis Apostolellis taught with the curriculum in Spring 2018, giving both valuable feedback and BEAUTIFUL slides.
• Cal Ribbens spearheaded the funding for a grant from TLOS and was responsible for starting this effort.
• TLOS gave us lot’s of money and guidance to rebuild the course.