Editing Community Data Science Workshops (Spring 2014)/Reflections (section)

== Session 0: Python Setup ==

The goal of this session was to get users setup with Python and starting to learn some of the basics. The setup curriculum was adpated from BPW. We ran into the following challanges:

* Users on Windows struggled to get Python setup and added to their path.
* Users had different (and often older) version of Python which became a bigger issue when we began using web libraries.
* Mac users struggled with — and generally did not like the Smultron text editor that we recommended.

We proposed the following changes:

* Use [https://store.continuum.io/cshop/anaconda/ Anaconda] for getting Python installed (following SWC)
* Use a different text editor for MacOS. [http://www.textwrangler.com/ Text Wrangler] was suggested.
* In browser Python (e.g., http://repl.it) is intriguing but perhaps not either ready enough or "real" enough.
* Emphasize more strongly that Windows users ''need'' to come to Session 0 to se up
* Change the Code Academy lessons to remove and change the HTML example. Users that knew HTML already were often confused because printing "&lt;b&gt;foo&lt;/b&gt;" did not result in actually bolded text. This was just the wrong choice for a simple string concatenation example.
* Add some text to emphasize the difference between the Python shell and the system shell. Students were confused about this through the very end.
* Add a new check off step that includes the following: create a file, save it, run it.