Teaching IronPython: D520 Course Notes (Week One)

Tony Andrew Meyer has now started teaching course D520 ("Programming") at Northtec. He's using IronPython in Action as course material (see IronPython in Action goes to college) and has written up his search for an IDE for his students.

The course is now starting and he is promising to post his notes online as he goes:

• IronPython Course Notes – The Plan

Since I decided to use IronPython as the programming language for teaching D520 at Northtec, I’ve planned on putting my course material online so that anyone else planning on using IronPython in teaching can make whatever use of it they can. There won’t be a huge amount of material, especially in this first year, and especially since I managed to find an excellent textbook to use, but there will be some exercises, assignments, an exam, and so forth. Each year I teach a course I add new material, and while some material is replaced or removed, usually the old material stays, so the amount of material gradually increases.

Week one of the course has now happened and Tony has written up a post-mortem:

• D520 Week One

As promised, here’s my material from the first week of “D520: Programming” (in IronPython). I have the students a set of revision exercises [PDF], a course outline [PDF], and some brief notes [PDF]. The notes have four sections (this pattern will continue): which chapters of the textbook are covered this week (and a couple of sentences that summarise them or point out which parts are important to us), the tools that are required this week (since this is the first week, this section is large, covering installation of Adobe Reader, IronPython itself (including putting it on the PATH), and several IDEs (as previously covered), including configuration), key points, and example code (the examples that I plan to use in class). For anyone interested (chiefly: me in about nine months time, when I’m planning the 2010 course), here’s a summary of the first week. It’s rather long (2100+ words) – the summaries of future weeks should be shorter.The students seemed fine with the choice of textbook, and that there was one. I expected more grumbling about the price, but perhaps they just kept that to themselves. There did seem to be a moderate amount of interest in the ebook version over the print copy. The real test of the textbook starts next week, since none of the students were organised enough to buy the text before the first class, and so hadn’t seen it or read the first two chapters, which we covered. They are expected to have at least skimmed through Chapter 3 before next week’s class.