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• Specific skills become rapidly outdated.
  • Need to select skills that won't become outdated easily.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.