August 06, 2018

Helping Teacher's Bring Python Into The Classroom With Nicholas Tollervey

59 minutes

Summary

There are a number of resources available for teaching beginners to code in Python and many other languages, and numerous endeavors to introduce programming to educational environments. Sometimes those efforts yield success and others can simply lead to frustration on the part of the teacher and the student. In this episode Nicholas Tollervey discusses his work as a teacher and a programmer, his work on the micro:bit project and the PyCon UK education summit, as well as his thoughts on the place that Python holds in educational programs for teaching the next generation.

Preface

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Your host as usual is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Nicholas Tollervey about his efforts to improve the accessibility of Python for educators

Interview

Introductions

How did you get introduced to Python?

How has your experience as a teacher influenced your work as a software engineer?

What are some of the ways that practicing software engineers can be most effective in supporting the efforts teachers and students to become computationally literate?

What are your views on the reasons that computational literacy is important for students?

What are some of the most difficult barriers that need to be overcome for students to engage with Python?

How important is it, in your opinion, to expose students to text-based programming, as opposed to the block-based environment of tools such as Scratch?

At what age range do you think we should be trying to engage students with programming?

When the teacher’s day was introduced as part of the education summit for PyCon UK what was the initial reception from the educators who attended?

How has the format for the teacher’s portion of the conference changed in the subsequent years?

What have been some of the most useful or beneficial aspects for the teacher’s and how much engagement occurs between the conferences?

What was your involvement in the initiative that brought the BBC micro:bit to UK classrooms?

What kinds of feedback have you gotten from students who have had an opportunity to use them?

What are some of the most interesting or unexpected uses of the micro:bit that you have seen?

Keep In Touch

@ntoll on Twitter

ntoll on GitHub

Website

Picks

Tobias

The Dark Materials Trilogy Audiobooks by Phillip Pullman

Nicholas

Moon Dust by Andrew Smith

Totally Wired by Andrew Smith

Links

ntoll.org

Tuba

Royal College of Music

Fry IT

MicroPython

Podcast Interview With Damien George

MicroPython Book

Scratch

Jupyter

John Pinner

London Python Code Dojo

Alan Turing

Tim Berners-Lee

Charles Babbage

REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop

Daniel Pope

PyGame

Raspberry Pi Foundation

PyGame Zero

Network Zero

GPIO Zero

Computing At School

BBC

PSF

TouchDevelop

TypeScript

Damien George

ARM

Code Kingdoms

micro:bit

Barclay’s

PyCon US Education Summit

Raspberry Pi Foundation Code Club

Qumisha Goss Keynote

Adafruit

CircuitPython

NeoPixel

PyBoard

The intro and outro music is from Requiem for a Fish The Freak Fandango Orchestra / CC BY-SA

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By Tobias Macey

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