Since June 2011, members of the Philadelphia Python Users Group have offered special “PyStar” workshops and project nights to introduce Python to a diverse group of new coders. Our semi-annual project-based introduction to Python event — currently taught by Dana Bauer, Maneesha Sane, Sarah Gray, Pam Selle, Mjumbe Poe, and Bennet Huber — is designed to appeal to women with little or no programming experience.

Over the past two years, our workshop instructors have learned that a team-teaching approach is the key to success. Last weekend, at our fifth Python workshop, Dana and Mjumbe taught a morning lecture covering basic concepts from data types to dictionaries. Maneesha led students through a fun Scrabble game, and Pam showed students how to play with the Twitter API. Sarah gave a lightning talk on thinking like a programmer, and Bennet gave a brief overview of IPython Notebook. Several terrific TAs — Tim Gross, Alyssa Batula, John Campbell, and Jeff Patti — helped the group of 25 students work through Coding Bat and Codeacademy exercises. Monetate, a local Python shop and longtime supporter of PhillyPUG, hosted and sponsored the event.

Philadelphia Python Workshop students practice Codeacademy exercises during our April 5 and April 6 workshop.

We’re also big fans of cross-community collaboration. We use a curriculum developed by Jessica McKellar and Asheesh Laroia of the Boston Python Workshop. To reach a wider audience, we partner with local groups like Girl Develop It, Code for Philly, The Hacktory, and TechGirlz. In addition to workshops, we offer project nights and special events to help new coders explore different ways to use Python, in areas including data visualization, webmaking, civic hacking, mapmaking, hardware hacking, and text analysis.

At the end of last weekend’s workshop, we gave students lots of practice material to take home, including the New Coder project developed by Lynn Root for Pycon 2013. We also offered our students a chance to write a short essay to win a seat at a data visualization workshop offered by our friends at The Hacktory, an arts-based hacker community.

The ticket winner was Noor Bosch, a bioengineering student at the University of Pennsylvania. She wrote a compelling essay about how the data visualization workshop could help her:

“due to its intuitive nature, Python is eventually going to take the place of MATLAB in computation and graphical analysis of engineering signals and systems. As a bioengineer, I work extensively in MATLAB, which is awesome and powerful. But I really think that the ability to do the same analysis in Python would provide seamless integration with many other programs that bioengineers (and mechanical engineers, and computer scientists, and electrical engineers) use… the skills that I would learn over the course of this workshop are exactly applicable to what I hope to be able to use and build upon in my future career as a bioengineer.”

Last weekend, Noor became the workshop’s 140th graduate. Congrats to Noor and all of our graduates! We’re looking forward to our sixth Python workshop later this year.