GNUnify2010 was the first for me. Started a bit early to the venue, Rahul was along with me. His talk was in top of schedule. I slowly moved to the lab where my python workshop was scheduled.
The main target of the workshop was to show/teach the basics of the python programming language. I hear mostly students asking “How to start working on a project?” but as the learning curve is not so easy in most of the things, they run away. The only students we have from India who are contributing to any FOSS projects are the people who came in their own interest. I found programming with python can be an easy entry point for the general students and they can become better programmer in life. This is the main reason behind my python workshops in different places.
No need to buy books, great online community, projects working on different dimensions, all of these can generate interest in the students.
Coming back to my workshop, I generally try to follow my own book (which I have to update). Slowly going through simple examples and showing that it is not difficult. I ask the students to solve the lab works they do in any programming lab in python. This will help them to understand the basics of the language. The workshop lab was supposed to have 30 students, but many more came so I had to ask them to seat in groups in the computers (most of them was running Fedora ). The basic feedback I got, states that it was easy, but how the students are going to use this, I have no clue. Btw, most of the students in my workshop were from Pune University Maths department, I told them to attend Ramki’s workshop in the second half as his workshop was about explaining how to solve mathematical problems.
At the end of the workshop I showed few applications written in python and talked about job opportunity in market. 2 students contacted me after the event.
Full set of the event photos can be found here.
Coming month, I will be in Durgapur, doing another python workshop , I will also conduct a Django workshop.
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