Mailund on the Internet

Once again I find myself writing lecture notes for my programming class Applied Programming.

It is a lot of work, and I really would prefer not doing it and using a text book instead, but all the text books I have seen for Python programming falls in one of two categories: Either they assume that the reader is a moron who has to have everything explained in every single little details over close to one thousand pages, or they assume that the reader already knows how to program and just needs a quick introduction to Python.

Neither really fits my purposes.

I have seven weeks to teach basic script programming, so I only want to cover the bits really essential for that, and since I teach mainly biology and medical students I can safely assume that this is the first time my students are exposed to any kind of computer programming.

It is the second time I teach the class, and last year I tried using a text book supplemented with lecture slides, but that didn’t really work so well, so this year I am going to write enough lecture notes to cover the material I need.

I had to write my own lecture notes in previous programming classes as well, but those classes was for people familiar with the basics of programming and Python who just needed to know a little extra stuff useful in bioinformatics, so those were completely different notes and I cannot reuse any of it this time.

I plan to spend one day a week on lecture notes this time around.  I don’t have time for more.  We will see how that goes, and how much I need to add on top of it next year, where I can take the next iteration over the notes.

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Tags: programming, Teaching

This entry was posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.