Friday 3:15 p.m.–3:45 p.m.

Teaching Python: To Infinity and Beyond

Kushal Das

Audience level:
Novice
Category:
Community

Description

Dgplug summer training is a free online IRC based course which aims to teach FOSS ideas and programming in general using Python to new programmers/stduents. In this talk we share our experiences, lesson learned, hoping that people will be able to replicate this in other parts of the world.

Abstract

Abstract -------- Back in 2004, when I founded "Durgapur Linux Users Group", I chose a motto in Bengali, "Learn yourself and teach others". We are following the same rules today and one major program which helped to keep it going is the summer training. Just before summer 2008, with help from Shakthi Kannan (well known FOSS developer and mentor from India), we sent a mail to the various lists announcing an online summer training over IRC. The same training is now going on for the sixth year. Every year we see an increase of interest in the students and we started getting students from other countries too. The duration the training is around 3 months on #dgplug channel in irc.freenode.net This [presentation][1] was the primary announcement this year, opensource.com also covered the [story][2]. In 2013 around 20+ students are working on various projects (upstream and ideas from scratch), half of the students are girls and we had a very good diversity in last years too. Among the students this year, we have engineering college students, new hires in different IT companies, primary school English language teacher, a musician who loves to play his piano, system administrators from far corners of world. [1]: http://dgplug.org/summertraining/ [2]: http://opensource.com/life/13/6/learning-program-open-source-way