Minutes 2010/06/05
Python in Schools
Notes from Robert's talk on the recent proposal to the Western Cape education to consider Python as the primary language for use in high school IT studies.
- Robert and Marco know Western Cape IT curriculum advisor, Mr Brock.
- Current curriculum:
- Western Cape and 3 others use Delphi
- Other five use Java
- Have to set two exams, two sets of examples
- Interaction with Delphi very GUI orientated
- Tension between the two groups
- Language flamewars
- New proposal:
- Everyone switches to Python
- Disadvantages all students equally. :)
- Different cases:
- Students continuing on to other languages.
- Students who will only do school computer studies.
- Teachers need / want an IDE for students.
- Current status after meeting:
- Western Cape people seem fairly convinced that Python is a good choice.
- Western Cape IT people will now try convince Delphi users.
- Need final proposal early September.
- Will make decision in early November and start training teachers.
- Curriculum to be deployed in 2012.
- Should curriculum be moving to web GUIs?
- Django?
- Teachers themselves don't agree about what should be taught.
- Specific skills become rapidly outdated.
- Need to select skills that won't become outdated easily.
- Lots of things are scriptable with Python:
- Mayavi
- VPython
- PyGame
- Turtle
- Learning by exploration?
- How many students would actually do this?
- How can CTPUG help out?
- Robert will ask Mr Brock how CTPUG can contribute.
- Marco and UCT are running another weekend Python course in August:
- Perhaps CTPUG people could help out as tutors.
- Perhaps invite teachers involved in language decisions to come help / observe.
- Handily this is just before the September decision.
- What is the current curriculum?
- Would be useful to get a copy.
PiCloud Talk
Links to things discussed:
- PiCloud
- High-level cloud computing interface using Python.
- Provides call(func, *args) and map(func, sequence) functions.
- Built on top of Amazon's EC2 and S3.
- Code that can be run pretty much unrestricted (NumPy and SciPy provided, can upload own modules, can read and write to filesystem).
- Can't listen for incoming connections.
- PiCloud service currently in beta and free. Later will be charged at approximately Amazon EC2 / S3 rates.
- Boto
- Lower-level interface to EC2, S3 and other Amazon Web Services.
- Allows control and creation of EC2 instances, load balancers, etc.
- Google App Engine
- Code than can be run tightly restricted (data must be stored via BigTable, no access to custom C extensions)
- Some ways for running GAE apps on your own hardware:
- AppDrop (not actively maintained)
- django-gae2django (run apps under Django, also not actively maintained)
- Execnet
- A library for setting up your own distributed Python computing environment.
Last modified
14 years ago
Last modified on Jun 8, 2010, 12:15:15 AM
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