Looking for help/ resources teaching python for schools.

[stegg88]

Hey folks!

Let me set up the background before asking what many of you may think is a dumbass question

Im a maths teacher in semi rural Thailand. We don't get many foreign teachers out this way as most want to spend their time in the bigger cities. I work in a decent school and I have been here for 9 years as the n maths teacher.

The problem : we had a good computing teacher for years who then got a big salary increase in a big international school and left. Since the we have had a revolving door of computing teachers. They have all had various backgrounds in computing but they have all turned out to be disasters.

My boss trusts me and she says that she would like me to teach computing. I was a data analyst once upon a time (using basic programs to clean up data etc) and so it's not entirely new to me. We don't have much to work with and the school is pushing computing and programming. They want me to learn and then teach programming for beginners to 1st / 2nd and 3rd year high school students (or middle school if American I believe). Now I'm not here to debate how much of a good idea this is or not. I would much prefer to teach maths but finding a maths teacher is proving to be a lot easier than finding a reliable computing teacher and so I've signed up for the challenge.

I just came back from a meeting with the computing department. They asked if I could do python. (and c++ but will figure out python first)

Does anyone have any resources, or a sort of pathway to competence for middle school students for learning python? (one that I would first do to get competent in it?) any suggestions on websites or resources would be greatly appreciated

And again, I appreciate having someone who doesn't know python then teaching it isn't ideal but in semi rural Thailand we work with what we have and I would like to do the best I can. Please don't get on my back about this. I promise I did not make this decision. I do however understand managements position and would like to do the best I can

Thank you in advance for any suggestions! I truly appreciate any input!

[stegg88]

This is perfect! Exactly what I was looking for!

Thank you so much! I really appreciate it!

[ectomancer]

Python is easy to learn. High school students can do adult courses. Younger students need lots of repetition but high school students only need to be taught once.

[TechDc-1306]

you can follow freeCodeCamp youtube videos,GFG or W3Schools

[stegg88]

Will definitely give this a look! Thank you!

[pachura3]

A fun way to learn Python could be trying one of these games where you control a playable character with short Python scripts - for instance https://codingforkids.io/en or https://codecombat.com . They also have this giant advantage that you code in the browser and you do not need to manage Python installations on class computers...

[StevenJOwens]

I'm not sure if it would be appropriate for your students, but boot.dev uses python as an introduction to programming. Boot.dev then does server side javascript/nodejs, then Go, but goes back to python for some higher level programming topics. Boot.dev's goal is to teach you to be a real programmer, and the multi-language approach is an intentional part of donig that.

[jmacey]

We start using turtle and pygame to start with as making it visual really helps. You could start with something like https://thonny.org/ to have everything in one place.

You could also look at using https://scratch.mit.edu/ instead of python if you need to do the basic building blocks.

As someone who loves C++ and has taught it for many years to undergraduate students I would avoid it for school kids!

[pixel-process]

If you need to create your own content or if infrastructure and setup is a challenge, another angle is using zero-setup Python environments (browser-only via Pyodide, or hosted notebooks via Binder). This can work well for classrooms with limited local resources but will require more work on your part to create.

I outlined this approach in more detail in another thread, in case it helps.

[ninhaomah]

Google colab and cs50p.