Hi, edu-sig. I'm not a teacher; I've taken an Intro to Python lecture around the Ohio region a bit, that's all. I have a bug in my brain to put together some material (a good website and a class) aimed at business users. Laura suggested that I get your input, which makes huge amounts of sense.
There's a new wiki page for the project at http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonForSecretaries - your ideas and resources, please! I'm finding that I need to mine information on some of these officey tasks from some very coarse ore; shortcuts you can provide will be quite welcome. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Catherine Devlin <catherine.dev...@gmail.com> Date: Sun, Sep 20, 2009 at 10:45 PM Subject: Python for Secretaries To: diversity <divers...@python.org> I'd like to ask for more input on a personal ambition of mine that has a diversity tie-in. I blogged about it here: http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/2009/06/python-for-secretaries.html The idea is a website and a class designed to show businesspeople a little bit of programming that they can use in the computer tasks they already have. Not to make them into real programmers (at least, not yet), but to show how they can automate some of the tasks that work makes them do anyway. (If a few of them end up becoming passionate hobby programmers, or even switching careers, and joining the ranks of contributing Python programmers... well, OK, that hope is the ulterior motive from our point of view.) I'd like your ideas on - what should be covered - any existing sources of documentation to draw on - tasks to automate I like the title "Computer Programming for Secretaries (and other businesspeople)", even though not many people are literally called "secretaries" anymore, because it's a very unpretentious title - it would emphasize that it's aimed at people who don't feel like they could survive a serious programming course. There are lots of beginning programming guides out there, but as far as I know, they are all aimed either at students, or at people who already know that they want to get deeper into programming; people who want to program for programming's sake. I'd like something for people with a totally different goal. It would differ from regular beginners' classes in that it: - would highlight ways to use data in typical business apps (yeah, that means MS Excel, Access, etc.) - this is *not* prominent information right now even for experienced Pythonistas - would feature exercises in business tasks rather than games, mathematics, etc. The diversity tie-in is this: here in the USA, a sampling of businesspeople working in most any office has a MUCH broader cross-section of the population than Python has now. Any recruits Python gets from such a population would almost certainly broaden us. Also, "secretary" has feminine implications in the U.S., and I wouldn't mind if that led to a female-heavy group of students. So, anyway. I'd love your suggestions (here or as blog comments). Oh, and - this is only one of my many ambitions and responsibilities, which means I'm not even going to get seriously started on it anytime too soon. Please, if you have the passion and the time, STEAL THIS IDEA! I'd love to hitch belatedly onto a train that *you* get going. -- - Catherine http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/ -- - Catherine http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/ *** PyOhio * July 25-26, 2009 * pyohio.org *** _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list Edu-sig@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
