Episode 149: Guiding Education with Sheena O'Connell

In this episode, Sean and Kelly speak with Leon Sandøy, one of the owners of Python Discord (https://www.pythondiscord.com) about making connections and community teaching. With the dynamics of teaching changing, how can Python Discord become a space to further educate the Python community? Also this week, we're excited to announce the launch of the new Teaching Python shop (https://shop.teachingpython.fm/), where you can get fun t-shirts, mugs, hoodie sweatshirts, and even some flip flops to show your support of the show. Use FRIENDS15 (https://shop.teachingpython.fm/discount/FRIENDS15) to get 15% off your first order! Learn more about Python Discord below from Leon. History of Python Discord I’ve been involved since 2017, when we had ~200 users. We worked hard to grow this community, and leveraged some pretty creative marketing strategies to find that growth. These eventually paid off, and as soon as we hit a certain critical mass, it’s been a runaway success story with win after win. The past year has been incredible. We’ve quadrupled in size, worked closely with Discord, with the Python Software Foundation, we’ve restructured the entire organisation from the inside out, launched new community features like the Help-channel system, started producing high-quality original content, and started reaching out beyond the Discord platform. The culture of Python Discord When I was growing up, IRC was a toxic and unwelcoming place where you went to talk to grumpy and jaded old programmers. We want to be the antithesis of this experience, a place of warmth and inclusivity that holds your hand until you find your footing. It’s the wholesomest place on the web. As a leader, I believe that we should be searching for these magical synergies between personal goals and community growth. I look for situations where I can put someone in a situation that will benefit both them and the community, perhaps teaching them a valuable and relevant skill while building us a valuable system. This has really paid off for us. I believe that managing a voluntary organisation requires a strong willingness to spend resources on cultivating motivation. Yes, this sounds like a TED talk. I’m sorry. It plays better as a conversation than as a long paragraph. You’d be surprised how much work goes into our community. I have 4 hours of weekly meetings, one-on-ones with staff members, interviews, programming and code review, and sometimes I record silly parody songs for our YouTube. This eats up literally all my free time, and the free time of everyone in admin team. We don’t do this casually, this is like a second job to us - or a second family. Major community features The help channel system Stay up to date by subscribing to our news channels, where you get Python podcasts, Python mailing lists (especially ideas and announcements), ongoing tech conferences, most popular Reddit r/python posts, and lots of other Python ecosystem info. Topical chat, featuring channels for all the different use cases that are particularly interesting for Python users. Many of these are populated by notable members, like our #async channel has asyncio core devs hanging out, and we people from Kivy, Arcade, Pyglet, Panda3D, and notable PyGame developers hanging out in #game-development. #microcontrollers has a number of Adafruit employees (including some of CircuitPythons key contributors) as frequent guests. Special Guest: Leon Sandøy.

12 Mars 202153min

Kelly and Sean take some time to reflect on what has worked well over the past year of teaching, what could be better, and what we hope stays with us once things go back to "The New Normal." Whether it's getting back collaborative whiteboarding, keeping screen sharing over Zoom, or appreciating how much better department meetings can be when we use breakout rooms, join us to talk more about how teaching and coding have jumped ahead during the time of COVID-19. As mentioned by Sean, the wordlist file on Macs can usually be found at /usr/share/dict/words.

3 Mars 202149min

Kelly and Sean try to figure out the role of object-oriented programming in teaching. From how much to focus on objects and methods, to whether it makes sense to teach classes, this is a journey through the opinionated topic of object-oriented thinking.

15 Feb 202140min

A grab bag of topics this week with Kelly and Sean. From using NLTK to summarize speeches by civil rights leader Martin Luther King to plotting Parler data from the Capitol incident on Jan 6 to WiFi-enabled washing machines. Kelly and Sean spend the afternoon discussing the things that we've been watching and learning about this week. No guests, no specific topic. Just hang out with us and talk about all things Python, teaching, and learning.

29 Jan 202141min

Kelly and Sean team up with Bob Belderbos and Julian Sequeira from @PyBites to answer questions about how our students learn Python using the PyBites platform with small code challenges. In this special crossover episode, we cover everything from how students learn to the way they learn Pytest reporting output to the mindset and chemistry of learning something new. Special Guests: Bob Belderbos and Julian Sequeira.

22 Jan 202145min

In this episode, Kelly and Sean dive into the topic of teaching kids to “Figure it out,” a phrase we love to use in class. This year, we seek specific skills that help us teach reluctant learners, techniques for figuring things out, and understanding how different teachers support this skill in their classrooms. In this episode, we ask some of our colleagues to share their experiences on how they as adults solve problems and how they teach their students this critical life long skill. Special Guests: Jessica Gilbert and Roslynn Jackson.

12 Jan 202141min

We get a lot of questions about what parents should buy for their children for the holidays. In this episode, Kelly and Sean list out some of their favorite gifts for the holidays. Episode highlights: Kelly & Sean celebrate two years of the Teaching Python and 183,000 downloads later. Kelly wins with a student that demonstrates year over year improvement in Computer Science. Sean builds a FastAPI and gets a steep learning curve. Kelly gets a birdbrained robot finch.

10 Dec 202031min

In this episode, Kelly and Sean talk with Dale Lane an IBM Event Streams Lead Developer. - IBM awarded Dale, the 2018 IBM Volunteer Excellence Award—the highest form of volunteer recognition given by the company—which also earned a USD 10,000 grant from IBM for Solent Youth Action. “Machine learning systems are all around us. We all use, interact with, or are affected by, machine learning systems every day. If our goal is to help children to understand how the world around them works, then understanding machine learning is an important topic. Also, the impact machine learning systems will have on our lives will only continue to increase. There is a growing need for society to make decisions about how we want such systems to be managed, controlled, and regulated. Understanding machine learning is an essential topic to help the next generation engage in that societal debate.” Dale Lane IBM Interview Special Guest: Dale Lane.

1 Dec 202039min