Audience and their needs and objective of foundation material: first steps

[kitmacleod]

Great to see your tweet about the 'foundations' material. You will have considered this and will collectively have a clear idea of audience and purpose (and a lot more Python/programming teaching experience than me). If not already considered, then using a sample of intended audience/users then get their feedback on current structure and content (also useful to know their programming/data science backgrounds; which will be varied, even in the US). If truly going from 'zero' then I would suggest very careful consideration of this onboarding and initial steps (e.g. before getting overwhelmed by Matplotlib's API; respect to John Hunter and many others). Yesterday, I came across this useful approach (from the Julia community) Is this course for me? Julia Programming For Nervous Beginners "Our philosophy can be summed up in the slogan 'Take small steps, leave no gaps, everything makes sense" (P.S. I have not gone through the series to assess if they deliver this). Related to this key onboarding, is to consider a short (10 min) video as many learners benefit from that format, in part as it can provide key info missing from text. An example from a master (of developer relations) is I noticed MongoDB are increasingly providing blog posts in text and video format (quite a commitment/overhead).

[clyne]

+1 for "Take small steps, leave no gaps, everything makes sense" and videos. Stay tuned!