Helping Teacher's Bring Python Into The Classroom With Nicholas Tollervey

Summary

There are a number of resources available for teaching beginners to code in Python and many other languages, and numerous endeavors to introduce programming to educational environments. Sometimes those efforts yield success and others can simply lead to frustration on the part of the teacher and the student. In this episode Nicholas Tollervey discusses his work as a teacher and a programmer, his work on the micro:bit project and the PyCon UK education summit, as well as his thoughts on the place that Python holds in educational programs for teaching the next generation.

Preface

• Hello and welcome to Podcast.__init__, the podcast about Python and the people who make it great.
• When you’re ready to launch your next app you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out Linode. With private networking, shared block storage, node balancers, and a 200Gbit network, all controlled by a brand new API you’ve got everything you need to scale up. Go to podcastinit.com/linode to get a $20 credit and launch a new server in under a minute.
• Visit the site to subscribe to the show, sign up for the newsletter, and read the show notes. And if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions I would love to hear them. You can reach me on Twitter at @Podcast__init__ or email [email protected])
• To help other people find the show please leave a review on iTunes, or Google Play Music, tell your friends and co-workers, and share it on social media.
• Join the community in the new Zulip chat workspace at podcastinit.com/chat
• Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Nicholas Tollervey about his efforts to improve the accessibility of Python for educators

Interview

• Introductions
• How did you get introduced to Python?
• How has your experience as a teacher influenced your work as a software engineer?
• What are some of the ways that practicing software engineers can be most effective in supporting the efforts teachers and students to become computationally literate?
  • What are your views on the reasons that computational literacy is important for students?



• What are some of the most difficult barriers that need to be overcome for students to engage with Python?
  • How important is it, in your opinion, to expose students to text-based programming, as opposed to the block-based environment of tools such as Scratch?
  • At what age range do you think we should be trying to engage students with programming?



• When the teacher’s day was introduced as part of the education summit for PyCon UK what was the initial reception from the educators who attended?
  • How has the format for the teacher’s portion of the conference changed in the subsequent years?
  • What have been some of the most useful or beneficial aspects for the teacher’s and how much engagement occurs between the conferences?



• What was your involvement in the initiative that brought the BBC micro:bit to UK classrooms?
  • What kinds of feedback have you gotten from students who have had an opportunity to use them?
  • What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of the micro:bit that you have seen?

Keep In Touch

• @ntoll on Twitter
• ntoll on GitHub
• Website

Picks

• Tobias
  • The Dark Materials Trilogy Audiobooks by Phillip Pullman



• Nicholas
  • Moon Dust by Andrew Smith
  • Totally Wired by Andrew Smith

Links

• ntoll.org
• Tuba
• Royal College of Music
• Fry IT
• MicroPython
  • Podcast Interview With Damien George



• MicroPython Book


• Mu


• Scratch


• Jupyter


• John Pinner


• London Python Code Dojo


• Alan Turing


• Tim Berners-Lee


• Charles Babbage


• REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop


• Daniel Pope


• PyGame


• Raspberry Pi Foundation


• PyGame Zero


• Network Zero


• GPIO Zero


• Computing At School


• BBC


• PSF


• TouchDevelop


• TypeScript


• Damien George


• ARM


• Code Kingdoms


• micro:bit


• Barclay’s


• PyCon US Education Summit


• Raspberry Pi Foundation Code Club


• Qumisha Goss Keynote


• Adafruit


• CircuitPython


• NeoPixel


• PyBoard

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA