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

== Session 1: Introduction to Python ==

The goal of this session was to teach the basic of programming in Python.  The curriculum for BPW has been used many times and is well tested.  Unsurprisingly, it worked well for us as well.

That said, there several things we will change when we teach the material again:

* If possible, we would have liked to do introductions (i.e., simple "your name and where you are from and what you want to do up") which would have been useful up front — even in a big group. This seems more important in a multi-day event and would have been useful for the mentors.
* The BPW projects were not focused on data and were more like classic computer science class projects. In the future, we would like to choose some examples that are little more data focused.

=== Afternoon sessions ===

In terms of the afternoon sessions, we felt that the [[ColorWall]] example was ''way'' too complicated. It introduced many features and concepts that nobody had seen and many users were flustered. 

The [[Wordplay]] project was much better in this regard. In particular, we liked that Wordplay was broken up into a series of small example projects that each did one small thing. This provided us with an opportunity to walk through the example and then pose challenges to students to make changes to the code.

In the future, we will replace [[ColorWall]] with another more data-focused example. Our current thought is to build a little example involves interating through a pre-parsed version of the complete works of Shakespeare.