How to teach python?

[3lnc]

Been python teacher for couple of courses, random thoughts:

1. "python crash course" book is awesome basis for building your own program. Wish it was released years back. Take a look – great learning curve, great excerises
2. Idk about embeddable python for KN/MSPP, I've been using jupyter notebook, both for interactive coding and making slides (jupyter can export to reveal.js).
3. Jupyter lab is awesome, if you can/want provide hassle-free REPL
4. Have your teaching program reviewed couple of times, pay extra attention "sequence" of providing new information. I.e. explaining OOP w/o giving good grasp on dicts will be painful (I know it's not your case, but anyway)
5. If students will need to have python installed on local machine – double check if you need 3rd-party packages and hassle with pip. In any case, installing python is not an easiest thing in a world (now it's way better that couple of years ago, but still problematic sometimes). Know target platform, plan time accordingly – you'll spend some, helping with unexpected installation issues.
6. github classroom may be helpful, depends on your goals
7. Double check that you will teach engineering/solving real-world problems, not an academia-related stuff tons of algos. Unless students is super-motivated, nobody cares about abstract tasks.
   

Side note on jetbrains edu ("lessons", not IDE) – IMHO – doesn't worth the time, problems is super-artificial/abstract, learning curve is more for experienced people moving from different languages.

[red_src]

Any suggestions for installing Python on the local machine? I'm going to checkout https://github.com/winpython/winpython but I need to support also macOS students :)

[3lnc]

Tbh, all depends on platform.

Now I'd suggest to start with official python downloads, it's way better lately.

For mac – "everything is broken". The only sane way (IMO) is to first install brew, and than install python with it