PyStar - Programming Workshops for Women and Their Friends
The PyStar program is a workshop designed to teach women and their friends who are looking to learn how to program in a friendly non-alpha-geek environment. Currently there are PyStar events taking place in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area as well as similar workshops in Boston and LA. To organaize events using this curriculum or to add to it in any way please join our Google group http://groups.google.com/group/pystar
About
Goal
The PyStar program is a workshop designed to teach women (including trans women) and their friends who are looking to learn how to program in a friendly non-alpha-geek environment. The goal of this program is to increase the number of women in computer programming, especially in the Python language which is considered to be a very approachable language to get started with.
Pedagogy
The approach for this workshop is to have groups learning together with at least one guide or instructor who can lead where needed, and help out as requested while participants work through badges at their level of learning. At present there are two streams for the one-day workshop participants: Learning to Program or Web Application (using Django). One is more of a focus on the basics of programming and is well suited to students with very little experience in programming. The other is a bit more involved and will require network access as it includes putting a Django site up on the web.
Future
As these workshops begin to happen it is hoped that attendees will come back as assistants in future workshops with the end goal of having former participants become guides/instructors at future workshops. There may be a disproportionate amount of male teachers at initial workshops which is why we are encouraging participants to come back and take the lead as soon as they feel ready.
TODO
- arrange for distributed updates to pystar website
- more badges at different levels of programming (tiered badges)
- clean up & improve Windows set up instructions
- modularize (or turn into badges) the Django web app