Lessons learned from the Boston Python Workshop, an outreach event for women

This is a guest post by Jessica McKellar. Jessica is a software engineer and an organizer for the Boston Python Meetup.

This entry originally appeared at the OpenHatch.org blog.

My name is Jessica, and I’m an organizer, curriculum developer, and lecturer for the Boston Python Workshop, a free, 1.5 day project-driven introduction to Python for women and their friends. The workshop has run twice, in March and May, and the third run is happening in July at Google Cambridge.

I’d like to share some of the lessons the Boston Python Workshop staff have learned about organizing outreach workshops and our goal of bringing more gender diversity to the local Python community.

First, the structure of the Boston Python Workshop

The Boston Python Workshop is for women and their friends who have no or limited programming experience (I’ll talk more about “women and their friends” in a bit).

The workshop is held on a Friday evening and all day Saturday. On Friday, attendees set up their development environments and start learning Python through a self-directed tutorial and practice problems.

On Saturday, attendees continue learning Python with a 2 hour interactive lecture. Attendees and staff socialize over a sponsored, on-site lunch. In the afternoon, we break out into groups to practice Python while rotating through three short projects on a variety of fun and practical topics. Our projects have included writing parts of a Twitter client, how to cheat at Words with Friends, writing a basic web app in Django, and writing graphical effects for a ColorWall. Our material is all online, so check it out.

This comes to a solid 10 hours of learning and practicing Python, with support from a strong group of volunteers from the local programming and open source communities. The workshop is run under the auspices of the Boston Python Meetup (I’m one of the Meetup organizers) and we hold follow-up events like an open Project Night through the Meetup.

Lessons learned about teaching Python to beginners

There is a huge difference between teaching Python to people with programming experience in another language and people with absolutely no prior programming experience. The biggest lesson we learned is that if you are going to teach absolute beginners, you have to commit to really starting at the beginning:

• Make getting your environment set up a part of the event. If you say that attendees need to install Python and dependencies before the event, you will scare off some beginners. For us, environment setup includes:
  • installing Python
  • on Windows: adding Python to your PATH
  • practicing starting and exiting a Python prompt
  • installing a code-friendly text editor
  • practicing running Python code from a file
  • installing dependencies for the Saturday projects

We provide step-by-step instructions for Windows, OS X, and Linux. We want people to leave Friday confident in their ability to create and navigate a Python development environment.

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