Hi All, This might be of interest to budding teens (and adults <https://groklearning.com/professionals/>) who are interested in learning Python. They have learn at your own pace and an upcoming competition to challenge others taking part.
They are open to everyone around the globe to participate. You can find more information at https://groklearning.com. Cheers, /// Vicky Twomey-Lee (PyLadies Dublin <https://twitter.com/pyladiesdub> Founder) Python Ireland <http://python.ie/> Treasurer EuroPython Society <https://ep2012.europython.eu/blog/2012/07/08/change-board-europython-society> PSF member <http://pyfound.blogspot.ie/2012/08/welcome-new-psf-members.html> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Georgina Wilcox Date: Sun, Nov 24, 2013 at 12:15 PM Subject: Hello from Australia Hi, My name is Georgina, and I'm a computer science PhD student from Sydney, Australia. I tried to email the Ireland girl geeks list, but it seems like that account is gone, and then I found out about codinggrace.com and it looks like a fantastic effort -- great work! Here in Sydney we (well, I and some of my fellow, err, sister PhD students here at the university), here we run something we call the Girls' Programming Network: a series of weekend workshops for high school aged girls. I'm contacting you in the hope that you might be able to help us reach a bit further... But first, some backstory: for the last few years I've been involved as a volunteer in a competition called the 'NCSS Challenge' -- it's a programming competition for high school students that teaches them to program while they compete. The competition is run by lecturers and volunteers from the University of Sydney. We've run the competition once a year since 2006, and we think we're getting fairly good at it... we've grown each year, and this year after reaching 7500 students and teachers across Australia (and a few from other places), we're ready to stretch out internationally as well. Starting in January next year we will be running a five week competition that is focussed more on the northern hemisphere, especially the UK. We've looked at the new UK curriculum, and the content from the five weeks aligns well with the learning outcomes from stages 2, 3, and 4 (more info: https://groklearning.com/uk-curriculum/). Actually better than in Australia, since we don't really have much by the way of a computing curriculum, and the national curriculum is still a work in progress. As we are quite a small operation at the moment with only two full-time staff, we are currently relying on word of mouth to promote our courses, so if you would be willing to post about the competition on your facebook page or mailing list, or twitter, we would *really* appreciate that. If you have any more contacts with school groups, or suggestions as to how to reach more students (and help plug the leaky pipeline, cf http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/unlocking-clubhouse), that would be fantastic... Here is a link with more information about the competition: https://groklearning.com/codecomp/ Regards, Georgina -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Python Ireland" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
