Bringing Python into the classroom Teachers across the globe have answered the call to code. "Yes," they say, "we will teach our kids to program, even if we don't know how ourselves." They've delivered lessons on Scratch; they've celebrated the Hour of Code. Perhaps they've even dabbled in Codecademy's offerings to familiarize themselves with this newly popular, suddenly ubiquitous competency called "coding." Where should students and teachers venture from there? Many — likely most — of these new explorers of computer programming are wholly unfamiliar with the language jungle that career developers and technologists swing through. This creates a stumbling point for students and teachers exploring computer science. Making the leap from visually assembling blocks of plain-language instructions as in Scratch to boldly typing bizarre syntax into a blank text editor is daunting to say the least. Tools like Codecademy can ease the transition, but even there the options can be overwhelming. After years of teaching students to program and think computationally, I'm convinced that Python is the best path after the usual learn-to-code activities. Here we'll explore how to get going in Python for authentic computer science discovery. See http://ift.tt/2cgBHch
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