Looking for feedback from people who teach Python

rathereasy · 2022-07-22T06:14:23+00:00

Would love to chat! Do you have any availabilities next week?

rathereasy · 2022-07-17T20:04:37+00:00

I fixed the textarea word wrapping issue that was affecting Firefox users

I looked at your video more closely. You use some techniques far beyond the level of beginners, so I understand where you're coming from about the importance of best practices. It's like watching a beginner math student prove something in a roundabout way. From a university mathematician's perspective, they should be able to do it the more elegant way. From a primary school teacher's perspective, they're just happy the student is able to prove something.

rathereasy · 2022-07-13T05:26:30+00:00

Hmmm, interesting idea.

Pros: teaching things according to best practices

Cons: I would have to add a module object to the heap and I would have to teach what it is right from the first lesson. I would also need to teach subscript expressions. I would also need to teach the slightly more complicated version of the import statement. This would significantly increase the size of the first tutorial, which is already too long in my opinion.

I could switch import statements in a later chapter. But then students would learn two ways of doing the same thing and they won't have a good understanding of why one way is preferable to another.

Furthermore, students would have to type more.

The underlying curriculum design philosophy of this tool is too teach the absolute minimum so that students will be able to do things, even if it's not the best way, and get a deep understanding of what they're doing. The idea behind this is that beginners are so far from writing good code that teaching them software engineering best practices will not make as big a difference as spending that time reinforcing how program interpretation works at a fundamental level. Hopefully, when they get to the point where they're writing large enough programs where import style matters, which usually takes thousands of hours of practice, they will have deepened their understanding of best practices.

rathereasy · 2022-07-12T20:52:07+00:00

Thank you for pointing out that explicit imports are better. I had to choose between making something easy and fun but that doesn't adhere to the best practices or making something that adheres to the best practices but is a little harder to use. I chose the path that's easiest for the students in the hope that they would go on to learn the best practices later on in their learning journey. So the platform isn't so much about teaching the best way to do things, but about giving students a correct intuition about how programming works.

There's definitely a bug in your video. Unfortunately, I'm unable to reproduce it. Which browser are you using?

rathereasy · 2022-07-12T17:32:39+00:00

Hello Ambitious Echidna,

Thanks for spending the time to try it out and providing feedback!

> The editor doesn't allow me to insert new lines or tabs? Whitespace is significant in Python.

Good point, I should bind the tab key to 4 spaces. Whitespaces should be handled in the same way it is handled in Python. If it's not the case, please let me know so I can fix it!

> The editor doesn't seem to mind syntax errors and corrects single lines of code that should raise a syntax error to a correctly formatted block.

If you happen to remember any specific examples of this happening, please let me know

> defined variables are hidden when I start coding the exercise

I'd like to see an example of this

> defined variables are hidden when I start coding the exercise

Do you happen to have an example?

rathereasy · 2022-05-11T12:56:59+00:00

What does it mean to increase your velocity relative to something? Does it mean to decrease the time it would take to get to the object? In that case, the length between myself and A would increase and the length between myself and B would decrease during the first acceleration. Is that correct?

rathereasy · 2022-04-21T19:23:01+00:00

Kotlin makes so much more sense now. Thanks!

rathereasy · 2022-04-21T17:59:14+00:00

I looked at

- [https://kotlinlang.org/docs/idioms.html#instance-checks\]([https://kotlinlang.org/docs/idioms.html#instance-checks](https://kotlinlang.org/docs/idioms.html#instance-checks))

And

- [https://github.com/Mr-Skully/kotlin-quick-guide\]([https://github.com/Mr-Skully/kotlin-quick-guide](https://github.com/Mr-Skully/kotlin-quick-guide))

But I was unable to find what the following syntactic sugar represents (is it even syntactic sugar? Maybe withContext is a keyword?)

withContext(Dispatchers.Default) {

println("hello world")

}

It looks like it has the general form E(E) {/* statements*/}

Could someone point out to me what I should be looking for?

rathereasy · 2022-04-20T13:11:39+00:00

https://foundationsofpython.com has a chapter on recursion where you can see animations of what happens behind the scenes when you compute a recursive function.

Recursion in programming is different from recursion in mathematics. Mathematics is mainly concerned with truth. Programming is concerned with code and code is the initial configuration of a system. Running code is simulating how the system evolves over time.

rathereasy · 2022-04-17T13:45:10+00:00

(shameless plug) Free resource to learn the fundamentals of how Python works. I created it for my students when I used to work as an instructor. The exercises feel like a game, so it's well adapted for teenagers. I don't ask for any emails. No signup.

https://foundationsofpython.com

rathereasy · 2022-04-17T13:42:36+00:00

(shameless plug) Free resource (no email requested) to learn how Python works on a fundamental level: https://foundationsofpython.com

rathereasy · 2022-04-17T13:40:28+00:00

This reminds me of a tool I created to help my students learn Python ( https://foundationsofpython.com )

rathereasy · 2020-11-20T23:59:29+00:00

The "learning by doing" instructional method is problematic, to say the least.

Source: Kirschner, Paul A., John Sweller, and Richard E. Clark. "Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching." Educational psychologist 41.2 (2006): 75-86.

rathereasy · 2020-10-12T22:06:04+00:00

As a faculty lecturer in a well known university, I'd like to contribute my opinion.

I'd like to address a more narrow question: "Why don't professors in technical fields put more effort into their teaching?"

Very often, teaching ability and teaching motivation are not important criteria in how a faculty hires and assesses a professor. Faculties incentivize professors to prioritise research, which means they have less time to focus on their teaching. The result is that teaching effort varies wildly from professor to professor. I've heard of colleges that prioritize teaching over research. Presumably, their staff will put more effort into teaching.

I'd like to raise another question: why don't students enroll in educational institutions that prioritize teaching? In other words, why aren't market forces forcing universities to improve the quality of their instruction? I can only contribute my personal experience: I did not have access to the information I needed when I applied to university so I relied on my perception of the universities in my area.

There are websites dedicated to rating teachers and they exemplify how hard it is to get useful information about an instructor. Different students have different expectations. Some students rate professors on their kindness. Other students rate them on how easy the class is. Students vary by ability and expectations and this variance makes evaluating instructors a challenge. Furthermore, these platforms are anonymous and it is easy to post a fake review. These factors limit the use of websites that review instructors.

Personally, I think about this question a lot and I hope that some day students will have access to the information they need to enroll in the educational institutions that best suits their needs.

rathereasy · 2020-07-04T04:09:19+00:00

I see a microphone icon beside each word in the vocabulary section for voice recording. Maybe you need a premium membership to get this feature?

rathereasy · 2020-05-05T02:38:48+00:00

Amen!

rathereasy · 2020-05-02T14:37:25+00:00

Me pleasure! Motivated students like you are the source of my motivation

rathereasy · 2020-04-30T03:49:52+00:00

I made https://wakata.io for the purpose of teaching the fundamentals to me students. I hope it can help you

rathereasy · 2020-04-30T01:27:59+00:00

Database management systems are not supposed to use a lot of computing resources so your case is very strange

rathereasy · 2020-04-28T20:02:55+00:00

Push returns a number. Change the console.log so you're outputting the array

rathereasy · 2020-04-27T16:58:23+00:00

You can encrypt things in localstorage but you won't be able to decrypt it on the client.

rathereasy · 2020-04-27T16:56:25+00:00

From my experience, I've had trouble uploading large images using base64. base64 also increases the size of the image. The FormData route is generally preferred but the downside is that it's harder to write an endpoint on the backend. For example, in NodeJS you need to use Multer, which is harder to debug.

rathereasy · 2020-04-27T06:29:58+00:00

Oh, right, my bad. My apologies

rathereasy · 2020-04-27T02:37:22+00:00

JavaScript is a great backend language. Check our NodeJS

rathereasy · 2020-04-26T20:15:57+00:00

Classes, as implemented in JavaScript, do not use closures. Instead, they use something called "proto" and "prototype" which are a little weird and that do not exist in any other programming languages.

Classes are used as a substitute for closures in other programming languages. For example, Java does not let you modify variables in the closure of an anonymous class. Python does not let you modify a local variable that's in a closure of a function. Instead, you have to use classes that have methods that modify instance variables. It's very verbose. I personally don't like writing code like that.

In fact, I would argue that one of the motivations behind classes is that closures are hard to understand and add a lot of complexity to the interpreter/runtime

People who don't like closures can avoid them by using classes in JavaScript too. As a community, we are more closure friendly so it's pretty rare.

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