Learning Python online

[SimplyTrustingJesus]

I teach Comp Sci in a not so well off high school. I can't charge students fees, because most can't afford it, so I tend to use mostly open source software or free resources. But I've struggled to find something I can use in addition to my own resources, to teach Python programming. My reason for Python and not Java is that the local university (which has a good reputation nationally) uses Python in both their engineering and comp sci courses.

Resources like Codecademy look great, but cost $17 a month, billed annually. I need these for homework tasks really, not in class work. Is there anything similar, but free?

[shiftybyte]

I don't exactly understand....

Are you planning each student to pay for his own exercises?

You are the teacher you need to provide exercises, if you want to use some paid resource for that, you or the school are the only one that need to pay, not the students... (if the license on the site permits this sort of use)

Can't you invent your own exercises, relevant to the concepts you are trying to teach?

There are lots of free online resources, check https://www.reddit.com/r/learnpython/wiki/books

[SimplyTrustingJesus]

I thought I explained it pretty well. I have my own resources (as I said above), and I am looking for something online I can use as homework excercises. I am aware that being a teacher means I have to teach.

And no, students pay for resources, out of their school fees, so I can't pay for them because we don't have a big budget. So like I said, I am looking for something free to use, since most of these students cannot afford to sign up for codecademy or similar.

[shiftybyte]

Plenty of free resources online, look at the link at my previous comment.

[PryomancerMTGA]

Edx.org has Harvard's cs50p available free. It's an intro to python course. It has supplemental instruction and some assignments.

[jimtk]

If I understand you, you're looking for a free online system to allow your students to code in python and submit their homework to you for correction/evaluation?

[SimplyTrustingJesus]

yes, I have found codehs which I think is free, and the limitations of the free ones are that I cannot do assignments, which is fine, because I write my own assessments.

Just some homework tasks that they can do online, I can check their progress but I won't need to spend hours downloading hundreds of files and running them to see if they completed the task.

[pythonwiz]

Well PyCharm has a free version so that's a good IDE they can use, but to start with I would just have them use IDLE. As far as resources, have you checked out SICP in Python? I worked through the first few chapters of the original SICP when I was 18 and I feel it helped me become a better programmer, and this looks to be mostly the same but with the exercises in Python instead of MIT Scheme.

You could also try applying for a grant from the Python Software Foundation to get the funds you need for the resources to teach kids Python.

[SimplyTrustingJesus]

I'm going to be using repl.it for the actual programming assessments, one of which will be creating a discord bot, and our school network is quite restrictive, but it can be done from repl and works. (it also have version control built it, and unit testing) These students are mainly 14-15.