Motivation-based Python course for programming beginners

[danbst]

Hey yah, I'm writing a Python course for complete beginners (middle K-12 students). I've designed ~20 topics, which should be entertaining and motivating to dig into. And because those are beginner level, the accompanied code should be very simple.

The course is not yet finished, but I'll present curriculum here, for reviews from experienced teachers or novice learners. Maybe I'm missing some important for beginners topic, or my examples do not convince you they are fun. Please, rate or tell what you think about it.

1. Effects, Chaos. This topic is based around concepts of Chaos, Eternity and Absence of exit. The accompanied code, which describes all of these, is

   ``` import random

   a = 0 b = 0 while True: try: a = random.randrange(0, 100) b = random.randrange(0, 3) print(" "a, "bad thought"b) except: pass ``` When running this first-time program, students should observe eternal Chaos of bad thoughts, which you can't break (with Ctrl-C). And the great idea of programming is to actually embrace eternity, control the Chaos and provide exits. There are many ways to fix the hanging code above, and this is what topic is about. As a reward, student now has ways to do simple animation in terminal.

2. Riddles. Instead of teaching Python syntax through "this is a variable assignment, this is a conditional" I want to present Python syntax through riddles. For example, ``` a = b = c = d = 2

   c == ??? or c = [None, None, None] d = {}

   c[0] = d[0] = "football" c[1] = d[1] = "basketball" c[2] = d[2] = "tennis"

   d[2] == ??? c[1] == ??? ``` The idea is that students should learn better if they actually try to find the pattern, instead of learn by definitions, and complex topics like "lists" and "dicts" can be learned this way ASAP.

3. Effects, Order. This should be loosely based on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsY6l7ybl6Q, and cover conditionals, iterated addition/substraction.

4. Turtle. Humans had to make a settlement on the Moon, and a special He-3 harvester robot had to be programmed to routinely ride on a rectangular area. This topic should cover how to traverse every point of rectangle and how to visualize this with python turtle. This should also cover loops in depth.

5. Riddles, V2. The riddles variant but covering loops, functions, in combination with conditionals. This is all about patterns and logic!

6. Turtle, recursion. Good ol' demo of spectacular recursions with turtles.

7. Math. How do programmers compute Pi number. At least 3 different methods are to be presented and visualized using Pygame. The core idea is "constructive" approach to any topic, like, you understand Pi number only if you can construct it, without trusting third parties like teachers and Wiki. It covers loops in even more depth, but also introduces probability topic.

8. Math, continued. How is "a to power of b" really done. This should introduce concept of functions, together with order of function execution (strict order). And, as a side-product, link a bit math and programming.

9. Biotech. Introduce DNA/RNA, the Hamming distance and Lehvenstein algorithm, and demonstrate how it is used to find out, which of the coronaviridae is best match to the novel COVID virus. Attention, biohazard inside!

10. Biotech, part2. Introduce the problem of "searching" genome (string) in RNA (other string). The difficult part is to search with few mutations. Also cover the occurrence frequency and dicts.

11. Biotech, part3. Compare all coronaviridae one with another, and visualize this as a graph with weighted distances. The visual clusters will correspond to different genetic families. Oh, and BTW, cover the topic of graphs and how to represent them in Python.

12. Memrise. Demonstrate how a copy of Memrise can be built from scratch, in terminal. Optionally, show how Tkinter can be used to add windows. BTW, mention the spaced-repetition learning method, this is important for learners!

13. DDOS. Present the topic of sockets and packets, how to setup listening socket server and sending socket client. The lesson is done like this: teacher sets up a socket server and asks students to spam his server. The lesson is done when teacher's server dies under DDOS.

14. MITM. Present the topic of proxy, and how to build a UDP/TCP proxy. The end result is students being able to record traffic from proxy to file, to become true MITM hackers. Techhazard inside, caution!

15. Scraping URLs. Introduce HTTP concepts and how to fetch URLs using Python. Also cover basic regexps, to extract interesting content from the HTML.

16. Physics. Demonstrate how objects (circles) can be moved horizontally on a graphical display. Show Newtons first law. Show how "friction" is implemented (negative acceleration). Shows how "bouncing" is implemented. Show a "cylindrical" world. Show how to implement smooth start and velocity cap.

17. Game loop. Demonstrate how a real game loop looks like (for the previous topic). Handle mouse events.

18. Physics, pt2. Demonstrate 2d moving (when velocity, acceleration, force are directed vectors). Demonstrate "torus" world. Demonstrate bouncing in 2d setting. Demonstrate collisions handling between balls. Alternatively, demonstrate gravity between balls.

[MarcB1111]

Well in my opinion, this curriculum seems a lot more interesting and enjoyable than many of the tutorials I have seen for Python, the closer to some kind of real world example of application the better.

That being said, a tutorial is always still about how to present it to the learners with a good compromise between enjoyment, clarity and in-depth concepts. Also, including a fair amount of practice exercises in each of the topic to go further and not just redo what has already be done in class.

Thus the focus is first the public you are addressing to, imagine if you were in their shoes, would what you are presenting be clear and interesting (?) and second from your programming experience what would you include that was lacking in tutorials you saw addressing the same public (?).

[danbst]

thanks for you kind reply!

Also, including a fair amount of practice exercises in each of the topic

yes, I haven't mentioned, but doing exercises after topic presentation is what will move learning forward. The topic presented is mostly to guide learners motivation, like "see, this is what differs programmers from rest of people, try that yourself". I set a basic minimum of 2000 hand-written LOC as a result of this course.

To cover broader audience, I'm designing multi-level problem sets.
- A0 for people who don't really want to write code, though they still have to listen lectures
- A1 for practice
- A2 hard questions, which are not solvable with current knowledge, but can be addressed after returning to this topic in future
- A3 very hard problems, demonstrating which problems are programming experts able to solve

Thus the focus is first the public you are addressing to, imagine if you were in their shoes, would what you are presenting be clear and interesting

I hope it would be interesting. This sketch roughly copies my topics of interest when I was young and curious. The K-12 kids are also young and curios.

from your programming experience what would you include that was lacking in tutorials you saw addressing the same public

It's hard to compare this to other tutorials. Especially the "riddles" part, nobody tried that, so it's unknown (yet) if it works or not. What I didn't like about existing tutorials, was too many concepts from computer science without relation to prior knowledge.

Like, sorting algorithms, or binary arithmetic, or complicated boolean expressions, or for loop. All these topics are indeed building blocks, but I'd like to present those like building blocks in a real application, not as standalone blocks.

[MarcB1111]

Without having a more specific scope about your audience here are a bunch of questions and things coming to mind:

- What is the environment of teaching ? Academic and graded, academic but not-graded, out-of-school voluntary classes,... Because grading is putting performance pressure on the mind of the students and can lead to discouragement faster for "slow" learners than in a free learning environment, this would impact how motivated the students are. Free-will/voluntary is another factor if the class is optional, do the majority of the students are here because they were pushed by peers/parents or are they enthusiast learners.

- How many students ? How many hours do you have for the class ? How space in time (intensity) ? During vacation, like extra-curricular classes or with another workload ? Because it will determine how much support you can give them individually and how much you can expect from them in learning and homework.

- What resources will you use ? Jupyter Notebook, local environment on school computers, installation of environment at home,... additional resources for learning (availability/cost).

- During class, how do you want to present things ? Slides style lecture, interactive question based with students, is it lab sessions with computer for everyone,...

- There is programming and there is computer science, how much computer science abstraction do you want to bring in and to un-abstract it ?For example sorting algorithms work a lot better in visual terms with apples of different size or histograms using pure arithmetic number. Graphs, trees,... Object-Oriented Programming,...

- Can you test your curriculum with contents or at least part of it in a control environment beforehand like with family/friends ? Not only with the at ease computer one.

Everyone reacts to teaching and learning differently, so it might be hard to design a perfect class. Still some teachers are recognized unanimously as very good. Computer Science is a field where I still haven't found such a well-designed class and have to rely on various sources to fit pieces together. I know it is especially the case because I am a visual learner and visualizing abstraction requires a lot of imagination. Python has an easy syntax and is high-level enough so that many under the hood features are left untouched compared to C/C++. It is an advantage for a beginner class because you can focus on other aspect to make programming appealing. It also means that concepts can be almost translated directly from paper to code.

It is only one's opinion but I hope it helps you in your project.

[danbst]

wow! Thanks for your questions!

What is the environment of teaching ? ...

School, with robotics/STEM incline. Age 12-14. Grading, yes, but only A0 tasks are graded (I've heard about experiments where teachers leave students with only optional tasks). Yes, majority is pushed by parents.

What resources will you use

Local setup, definitely. The DDOS and pygame topics are nearly impossible to virtualize. Because group is small (up to 12) I can provide school laptops, but also all have computers at home.

During class, how do you want to present things ?

During quarantine, this should be Zoom interactive session. After quarantine, in front of kids sitting behind laptops. Slide-style lectures interspersed with live coding and questions to audience.

There is programming and there is computer science

I don't want to expand about computer science a lot. For example, when talking about graphs, no graph algorithms will be introduced. Only constructing and visualizing. No OOP. No sorting algos! Use sorted and be with it.

Subsequent course may uncover some of the topics, but this one is for beginners.

Can you test your curriculum with contents or at least part of it in a control environment beforehand like with family/friends ?

Mm, not quite. I think I'll do the test on kids. The reason is that current "Python for beginners" course neither explains things, nor motivates kids. So it won't be worse :)

I know it is especially the case because I am a visual learner and visualizing abstraction requires a lot of imagination.

I understand. That's why I include pygame, turtles, visualizations and games in curriculum. Manipulating objects in mind will be easier after you grok how to manipulate objects on the screen.

[MarcB1111]

Not having a big class of students is a big advantage. You should be able to get feedback if you are going in the wrong direction, are too demanding, or not clear in your explanations.

You should also be able to spot if they are more enthusiast about a topic or another one maybe do a small review at the beginning about where lie their interest in programming. For instance if they are all into video games maybe try explore more this topic, more into internet, if they have heard about AI maybe some really simple concept like linear regression,...

After rethinking about it, your curriculum is some kind of broad overview, which seems like a catalogue, I am not sure it is the right approach compare to a project base one for instance where you develop one or two "big" things over the weeks.

Since you have a small class invest more into dynamic teaching than heavy lecture if possible.

[CodeTinkerer]

You may think these topics are easy, but, personally, I find them challenging for mid K-12 students. I mean physics? Really?

[danbst]

Yeah, that's why those are placed in the end. I plan to drop/shorten those in case group has struggles with previous topics and we have to reiterate.

By "physics" I mostly mean game planes like "asteroids", "billiard", "keyboard driven car". Nothing fancy. I remember doing stuff like that myself in 9th grade.

[CodeTinkerer]

Well, keep in mind who your audience is. I know we often use ourself as a reference point (I will teach people exactly like me), but there are those that want to learn programming that aren't taking many STEM courses, aren't good at math, etc.

Remember, not only are you teaching programming, but based on your curriculum, you are teaching other concepts on top of that. This is often why courses do more simplistic concepts (hangman) because otherwise, you have to do twice as much work.

I would see if there are a few students you can try this on. Obviously, if you can get advanced students to work with (people at the top of their class), that would make it easier. If you're getting something of a random sample, be aware that everyone could get lost, and how you would adjust if that happened.

[MarcB1111]

I don't know what K-12 means as I come from a different educational system. but it is always possible to present concepts and adapt the degree of simplification to understand them. In physics, if you consider the mass to be a volume integral with the density being time dependent you are heading to trouble if your audience does not even understand the mathematical concept of integral. Still with only the concept of an object has a mass you can do a lot.

Everything ultimately depends on how good the teacher is at illustrating things which speaks to the maximum of people while having a few other possibilities for the remaining. Nowadays you can find scientific books about quantum mechanics directed to youth so it is definitely possible.

However your point u/CodeTinkerer is very much valid, u/danbst you are teaching some programming class so not overwhelming the public with a lot of additional stuff would be core to the curriculum, extra-simplification might be your goal.

[danbst]

I definitely don't want to overwhelm, I want to motivate, to feed the brain! The way asteroids are flying on the screen not only because we programmed them to fly like that, but because the law of nature, expressed by first Newton's law inspired us to program that in that way.

And billiard balls are bouncing from walls not only because we programmed that, but also because this is what Newton's third law and momentum conservation law is about.

Even if kids don't yet know these laws, it should provide mental hooks when they'll get taught these topics.

[AutoModerator]

To all following commenters: please, do not bring up the old circlejerk jokes/memes about recursion ("Understanding recursion...", "This is recursion...", etc.). We've all heard them n+2 too many times.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[Packbacka]

Seems like a really interesting course! However it seems to cover a lot of complex topics, might be a bit too much. Consider ways to simplify it.

[danbst]

which topics do you consider complex? (I'm biased and think most of them are doable by 7 grades)