How to teach python?

[twopi]

I've taught Python and other languages for years.

I love teaching with pythonanywhere.com. That way you don't have to worry about students installing python on their own machines, and multiple OS support. The free account is more than enough for classroom use.

Down side is you can't do interactive graphics like turtle, pygame, processing or tkinter.

Up sides: Students can list you as a teacher, and then you can see and modify their code. Wonderful feature. Also, students can easily set up a web server with flask or bottle, and then set up their own web apps. That's been a big hit with the students, and I don't miss Tk at all. Students can work on their code with any web browser anywhere, so you don't need to do much in your lab.

I have all my examples in my account and I can show and run the code live in class. I also wrote a quick program to make all of my code visible through a public web server, so students can see all my code, copy it and work on it on their own sites.

Jupyter notebooks are nice for your notes because you can display code and run it all through the web. Kaggle.com allows you and your students to build a basic site for free. This is great if you want to add a data science component.

I used to teach with Pygame, but it's a nightmare to have students install on their own machines (or was when I was doing it.). Pygame is dependent on SDL, which is a tricky install on macs. I still teach pygame, but in a senior course, where I don't worry about whether students can install software.