Any interest in an Intro to Programming session?

[Jason Altekruse]

Hello PreteXt people,

I have been hanging around the orbit of PreteXt for a couple of years, I worked on Doenet for a while when they had an NSF grant. As I've attended PreteXt conferences and other meetings like the weekly drop-ins, I've noticed a good number of people that are PreteXt authors that don't consider themselves "developers" or "techies" and are always very grateful for all of the efforts provided by the team working on the core technology pieces of the project.

While I think there is an understandable desire in the community to continue to make PreteXt more accessible to less-technical audiences, so we end up with more accessible OER in the world, I wanted to ask to see if there are people in the community that would be interested in some intro to programming sessions to dip their toes in software development?

I've been working on some course materials for intro CS stuff, focused on self-contained lessons for those with little to no exposure to programming. So I'm in part looking to recruit guinea pigs to test those materials out on, but I figured there might be some members of the community interested in trying to expand their skill set in the direction.

I personally have a lot of interest in video game development, so I'd likely be hosting at least one session on creating your own small games. but I would also be up for doing sessions on topics like data analysis in python or a basic intro to databases class.