Hi all, having seen the discussion I feel obliged to add my own experience and perspective, and - maybe more importantly - some moderating comments.
To set the scene, I have taught C, Matlab and Python since 2002 to a variety of undergrad and postgraduate students at a university, but always to scientist and engineers (and more importantly: not to computer scientists), often in their first year of studies [1, 2]. Thus, I consider this experience relevant for the (software) carpentry mission. I think it is also important to note that teaching is not an exact science: In addition to experience, the exchange of anecdotal evidence and subjective impressions is often all we can use; so this exchange is useful. Regarding the question of how to teach Python to beginners (i.e. with or without notebooks etc): I mostly use Spyder to have an editor and (python) shell. Notebooks I generally introduce a little later (maybe after half of the course), when students are somewhat confident with the basic execution of scripts, and using a REPL. Why do I start with Spyder (without notebooks)? Because there is an additional overhead of jumping straight into notebooks, and I believe that it is important to understand the conventional python file that can be executed. Why do I introduce the notebooks later? Because they are incredibly useful for a number of purposes. In teaching, I like them to (i) document an interactive python session [where I start from an empty notebook and force myself not to go up to previous cells when I enter commands] so that the notebook can be given to students to play around with the taught material and exactly reply what was done in the lecture, (ii) to demonstrate something complicated where there is not enough time to show the details, but a prepared notebook can be used to show the outcome, while containing the details so that students can work through this conveniently just using the notebook. Going beyond notebooks as a tool in a teaching context, there are clearly very many applications of the notebook in academia and industry, and thus students should learn about it (at some point). Having said, that the world is complicated, and the problem of 'hidden state' discussed in this thread also hits students using Spyder. I wrote a tutorial for Spyder to help the students, and this tutorial has a dedicated section explaining issues of hidden state because I saw beginners running into this problem again and gain [3]; maybe less often than would happen using the notebook (I have not taken statistics on this). Why do I use Spyder and not just an editor and a bash shell in which we call “python myfile.py”? Because the ability to execute the code within a Python interpreter session (a la IPython %run) is a powerful tool (and also Spyder is an attractive environment to engineers, who are likely to see Matlab in their studies). My overwhelming impression from the discussion in this thread is that there are different use cases for all the tools discussed (jupyter, spyder, conda, ...), and how appropriate they are depends on the context and the skill set of the learners. The particular capability of the notebook, and the IPython shell in Spyder, that is discussed here (i.e. execute code from the editor or a cell within a given Python context and state) is actually an advanced tool. An advanced tool which is easier to understand and better to exploit by advanced users. But for the advanced users it would be wrong not to show them tool. Here is an analogy: to move from location A to location B, a bicycle is a pretty good choice. But it takes some learning to master it (even though this is easily forgotten). In particular, we generally teach small children to walk before they learn to ride a bicycle. But that does not mean that a bicycle is something that must be kept away from children - it is just more useful at a later stage. In how far my observations from teaching at a university - typically a few hours every week, coupled with weekly practical exercises, over 12 weeks, say - are transferrable to intense 2-day carpentry teaching is not clear, as learners at workshops have much less time to digest the information and concepts they are exposed to. Best wishes, Hans [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-25944-2_157 [2] https://fangohr.github.io/teaching.html [3] https://fangohr.github.io/blog/spyder-the-scientific-python-development-environment.html#run-configuration Professor of Computational Modelling University of Southampton Southampton, SO17 1BJ United Kingdom fang...@soton.ac.uk<mailto:fang...@soton.ac.uk> www: https://fangohr.github.io blog: https://fangohr.github.io/blog/ @ProfCompMod: https://twitter.com/profcompmod ------------------------------------------ The Carpentries: discuss Permalink: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/T1505f74d7f6e32f8-Mb6691a208a5d32f071d06b27 Delivery options: https://carpentries.topicbox.com/groups/discuss/subscription
