Carrie Anne Philbin - Keynote: Designed for Education: A Python Solution
Channel: EuroPython Conference
Date: 04/08/2015

Carrie Anne Philbin - Keynote: Designed for Education: A Python Solution
[EuroPython 2015]
[23 July 2015]
[Bilbao, Euskadi, Spain]

The problem of introducing children to programming and computer science has
seen growing attention in the past few years. Initiatives like Raspberry
Pi, Code Club, code.org, (and many more) have been created to help solve
this problem. With the introduction of a national computing curriculum in
the UK, teachers have been searching for a text based programming language
to help teach computational thinking as a follow on from visual languages
like Scratch.

The educational community has been served well by Python, benefiting from
its straight-forward syntax, large selection of libraries, and supportive
community. Education-focused summits are now a major part of most major
Python Conferences. Assistance in terms of documentation and training is
invaluable, but perhaps there are technical means of improving the
experience of those using Python in education. Clearly the needs of
teachers and their students are different to those of the seasoned
programmer. Children are unlikely to come to their teachers with
frustrations about the Global Interpreter Lock! But issues such as
usability of IDEs or comprehensibility of error messages are of utmost
importance.

In this keynote, Carrie Anne will discuss existing barriers to Python
becoming the premier language of choice for teaching computer science, and
how learning Python could be helped immensely through tooling and further
support from the Python developer community.