Daniel Nouri's Old Blog

Giving a Python tutorial here in Rabat at the Ecole Mohammadia d'Ingenieurs (EMI) turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences I had in a while. Today was the last of two days of Python for about 40 local students in two groups.

The tutorial itself was mostly stealing from Guido's Python tutorial with some modifications and some bits that I added. The clarity and the absence of noise in Python proved to make it very effective for teaching. Thanks to the interactive mode, I was able to demonstrate most concepts on the fly, which works brilliantly.

We used IDLE as the editor, which worked pretty well. Although I didn't have much experience with it, I knew that it would be the most straight-forward to dive in. One thing that I did find annoying about IDLE is that it doesn't print continuation lines (...) in its Python shell. I'm sure it makes it easier to copy and paste text, but it screws badly with indentation, which does trip up a few people.

Some of the students expressed an interest in Python web development. So with only the standard library available and one hour left in the tutorial we tried python -m SimpleHTTPServer, looked at the contents of that module, and at a custom subclass of BaseHTTPServer.BaseHTTPRequestHandler, one that implements a do_GET with a simple way to dispatch URLs.

I sum, I used some 170 slides (with very big fonts), which I'll put online after Morocco. The material turned out to be a tiny bit too much, and thus we skipped some exercises of the last quarter or so. In general, about half of the students were able to finish the examples in time, which gave me lots of confidence. Those who didn't work in pairs were more likely to be in the second half. :-)

I'm still staying in Morocco until Monday, which is way too short. This place is terrific.

Tomorrow we'll see a mini-conference, also at EMI, with some four presentations. Amine Soulaymani talks about Python vs. Java (it seems Java is widely used in schools here also). There'll be a PloneGov presentation, one about OpenERP (Abderrahim El Kafil). The subject will shift away from Python and more to Free Software in general. On Sunday and Monday, there'll be a PloneGov sprint in Casablanca that I'm attending.

Big THANKS go to Kamon and the rest of the Python African Tour team for organizing this, to the wonderful Aida and her hard working colleagues for making everything work out so smoothly here in Rabat, to the rest of the Moroccon students for being super friendly, and last-but-not-least to Joel and the PloneGov team for making this possible!

I think that with the Etape marocaine we've started something great. This is asking to be continued. Hopefully with more couscous, too.

Update: The slides for the Python tutorial are available now.